In an article titled 'Learning from Lagos', The
Economist dragged Nigeria's former capital city, then patted it on the back. Read what they wrote;
For a city that dubs itself the “centre of excellence”, Lagos has a
lousy reputation. The mere mention of Nigeria’s commercial centre
conjures images of crime, corruption and motionless traffic. The bodies
of people run over in car accidents can be left on the street for hours
and commuters in even the poshest parts of town are sometimes caught in
shoot-outs between robbers and policemen. Little wonder then that in a
ranking of the “liveability” of 140 cities by the Economist Intelligence
Unit, a sister company of this paper, it sits in the bottom five.
The
besieged Libyan capital Tripoli scores higher, and war-threatened
Damascus only fractionally worse. Its citizens are also an unruly lot:
men urinate on the don’t urinate signs, people hawk by the don’t hawk
signs and loiter by the no loitering signs.
Yet the city is a lot better now than it was two decades ago. Bola
Tinubu, who became the governor of Lagos State when civilian rule was
restored in 1999, remembers taking over a “slum”. “The traffic was
chaotic. The infrastructure was disintegrating. There were mountains of
refuse all over,” he recalls. “People were being murdered. Armed robbery
was rampant. Dead bodies were picked on the street on average 10-15
times every week. There was no control of any kind.”
Lagos was rundown in the late 1990s because it was badly run. Rapid
population growth, as rural migrants flocked to the big city,
outstripped its infrastructure. No one really knows how many people live
in Lagos: estimates range from 10m to 21m, but its congested roads and
bridges have space for just a fraction of them.
Under military rule, the city was neglected by the central
government. In 1991 Nigeria’s capital was moved to Abuja, an orgy of
grandiosity built in the middle of the country to symbolise unity.
Public spending followed the politicians there to pay for wide
boulevards and marble-floored palaces. After the restoration of
democracy in 1999 Lagos still found itself neglected, largely because
its citizens had the temerity to vote for opposition parties, the
forerunners of the All Progressives Congress (APC) that earlier this
year unseated the incumbent People’s Democratic Party (PDP) that had run
Nigeria for 16 years.
Mr Tinubu and his successor as governor, Babatunde Fashola, both say
their efforts to reform were often frustrated by the PDP-led federal
government. It failed to upgrade the main roads in the city that were
under federal control, including one leading to West Africa’s biggest
port. It delayed approval for an important train line that the state
government was willing to pay for. “I don’t want to be understood as
recriminating,” Mr Fashola says, “but I know things could have been
better.”
Instead of relying on Abuja for funds, Lagos learned to generate its
own. It created passable systems to monitor its own spending and squeeze
taxes out of citizens not known for their eager compliance with such
things. Internally generated revenue has risen to 23 billion naira
($115m) per month, from almost nothing a few years ago. That still
amounts to only a few tax dollars per person. But the state has been
able to borrow against that income to finance projects such as a
much-needed bridge linking the upmarket areas of Ikoyi and Lekki.
Moreover, its reliance on local tax collection has forced it to improve
its services in order to attract businesses.
And in this regard it has done well. The state produces about $90
billion a year in goods and services, making its economy bigger than
that of most African countries, including Ghana and Kenya. Much of
Nigeria’s industry, which once thrived in the north, can now be found in
the suburban manufacturing estate of Agbara. Cranes hang over the city
and land is being reclaimed from the sea as developers rush to satisfy
the vast appetite for property.
Seth Kaplan of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore argues that
whereas national elections in Nigeria are a squabble over petrodollars,
local elections in Lagos favour candidates who show competence and
pragmatism. The opposition’s success in managing Lagos played a big role
in its sweeping victories in state and national elections earlier this
year.
Now that the APC holds power in Abuja as well as Lagos, the city has a
chance to do better still. Many hope its efforts will not now
constantly be stymied by a ruling party afraid of being shown up.
It could also teach politicians in the capital a thing or two. One
lesson is that it helps to foster a broad tax base, instead of just
relying on oil (which provides more than two-thirds of the central
government’s revenues).
Better tax collection would make the budget less
vulnerable to wild swings in the oil price. It might also lead to more
accountable governance: people who pay tax tend to demand better
services in return. Another moral is that better infrastructure boosts
economic growth, and if you don’t have the money to pay for it upfront,
you can get private investors to do so instead: witness Lagos’s
toll-roads and bridges.
For badly run countries in other parts of the world, the big lesson
of Lagos is that reforms in one big city can sometimes kick-start wider
change.
