• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1081 0

7.2 to 10.6 million people. Nigerians are pouring in from the surrounding countryside and villages because there is money to be made in Lagos. The city has now run out of room, filling up its island and spilling across congested bridges to penetrate more than fifteen miles inland. By the year 2025, Lagos is projected to grow another 50% to sixteen million people, making it the twelfth-largest city in the world. With a 2007 gross domestic product of about USD $220 billion—bigger even than Singapore’s—Lagos is the economic epicenter of Nigeria and indeed of the entire western African continent.

Similarities between the two cities end there. Unlike Singapore, Lagos has not handled its growing pains well. It is an overcrowded dystopia of traffic jams, squalor, corruption, murder, and disease. Per capita income averages around USD $2,200 per year. Millions live in boats without electricity or sanitation. Four out of ten women cannot read. Police are outnumbered, ineffective, and unpredictably dangerous. The physical infrastructure is simply overwhelmed. Writes the urban geographer Matthew Gandy:61

The sprawling city now extends far beyond its original lagoon setting to encompass a vast expanse of mostly low-rise developments including as many as 200 different slums. . . . Over the past 20 years, the city has lost much of its street lighting, its dilapidated road system has become extremely congested, there are no longer regular refuse collections, violent crime has become a determining feature of everyday life and many symbols of civic culture such as libraries and cinemas have largely disappeared. The city’s sewerage network is practically non-existent and at least two-thirds of childhood disease is attributable to inadequate access to safe drinking water. In heavy rains, over half of the city’s dwellings suffer from routine flooding and a third of households must contend with knee-deep water within their homes.

The flooding observed by Dr. Gandy is a serious problem. Lagos’ extreme growth has pushed development, much of it slum, into the city’s last remaining real estate: swampy, low-lying swales that are barely above sea level. Human excrement flows in open ditches. Drainage is so bad that when it rains, the waste floats into people’s homes. Fewer than fifteen people per hundred have piped water, most instead rely on shared outdoor taps or wells. Nearly all water sources are regularly contaminated with E. coli, streptococcus, and salmonella. Unsurprisingly, disease is rampant, including typhoid fever, yellow fever, Lassa fever, malaria, leptospirosis, shistosomiasis, hepatitis, meningococcal meningitis, HIV/AIDS, and the H5N1 avian flu. Human life expectancies are just forty-six years for men and forty-seven for women.

It gets worse. Two-fifths of the people living in Lagos are victimized by corruption, especially demands for bribes from their public officials.62 Robberies, assaults, and murders are a constant fact of life. Failed by their police and judiciary, citizens form vigilante militias with names like the “Bakassi Boys,” who fight back at criminals with machetes and shotguns.63 When government officials perceive disorder, they issue orders to shoot on sight. In general, police and soldiers are best avoided in Nigeria, as it is not uncommon for police officers to simply shoot potential suspects rather than arrest them. Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, a domestic agency charged with monitoring the country’s human rights violations, recently compiled a heartbreakingly long list of abuses, including the following three incidents:64

[March 2, 2005] “A commercial bus with registration number, XA 344 plying the NorthBank to Wadata route was stopped by Police Constable (PC) Vincent Achuku, and without searching the bus, he demanded (money) bribe from the driver, Godwin Anuka. The driver pleaded with PC Achuku to let him continue with his journey and that he would pay on his return trip. This infuriated PC Achuku and he immediately cocked his service rifle, shot and killed the driver.”

[July 28, 2006] “In