Learning from Lagos

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.”