Decongesting Lagos
By Victor Ifedi
A NOTORIOUS feature of the territories now comprising Lagos State over the years has been haphazard development. Many of the popular towns in the state, particularly in metropolitan Lagos were unplanned. They sprang up as contraventions and the government of the day rendered helpless by the sheer quantity of the contraventions eventually accepted them as de facto townships. The direct result of these unplanned development is that there are no infrastructural services in most of them and such as exist are grossly inadequate. The particular, the essential urban services of water supply, drainage, good roads, electricity, telephone and solid waste and disposal have not been able to keep pace with the expansion of the Lagos metropolitan area.
The 1991 population census stated that Lagos State had 2,999,528 males and 2,686,252 females making a total of 5,685,781 people. The rate of population growth has been in excess of nine per cent in recent years thus resulting in an additional 300,000 persons per annum or 25,000 per month or 833 per day or 34 per hour.
According to Lagos State regional plan 1980 to 2000 produced by the L.K. Jakande administration, house ownership in Lagos State is low. Only eleven per cent of the dwellings are owner-occupied. Three quarters of the total number of households occupy dwellings of only one room. The average room areas are only twelve square metres and occupancy ranges from 5.2 persons per room in metropolitan Lagos to three persons per room in other urban centres in the state. Lagos State contains the largest concentration of industries in the country. The National Manpower Secretariat survey estimated that over fifty per cent of the skilled people in Nigeria is employed in Lagos. It is also projected that one in every four workers in the modern sector lives in Lagos.
In the light of the foregoing data, the economy of Lagos State is expectedly under severe stress. There are agriculture manufacturing, utilities, building and construction, distribution, transport and communication as well as public administration. Lagos accounts for every fifty per cent of the total value added by the manufacturing sector in the country. The Apapa port and Murtala Mohammed airport constitute the largest port and aerodrome in the country.
To tackle the prevailing congestion problem, action should be taken at the federal and state levels. Pragmatic policies must be evolved to address the critical issues. The polity at the national level should deal with the wider demographic and economic aspects. At the sate levels, the relevant policies should tackle the internal distribution of the population and macro-economic activities within the state.
It is indeed disappointing that the well-focused development schemes incorporated in the Lagos State Regional Plan 1980 to 2000 have been discarded by subsequent governments. For instance, the thirteen development areas which could have formed the basis for formulating policies towards correcting population imbalances have been ignored. Among the recommendations in the plan was the decentralisation of Lagos Island and the provision of new transport links.
Successive governments have not implemented identified strategic programme. They include the location of new industrial zone in Ikorodu, Agbowa, Epe, Badagry and Poka-Odorangunse, location of a new local airport in between Ibeju and Agidi south west of Ajero, location of a new sea port at Orimedu south of Epe and the development of a new town to support the port functions as well as the location of a major green areas in Ogun valley, Ologe lagoon, Ona river and the development of a recreational zone occupied with tourism along the Atlantic Ocean coastline.
What is paramount now in Lagos decongestion is the dispersal of the exploding population to the suburbs and the creation of satellite towns around the Lagos metropolis. Transportation in Lagos State needs modernisation to facilitates movement to areas outside the metropolitan centres. Rickety vehicles such as molues should be proscribed from plying the highways just as the former bolekaja contraptions were phased out.
We join the Federal Road Safety Commission in appealing to the Lagos State government for the provision of road infrastructure and road outlets to enhance traffic flow in the state. We also applaud the proposed Fourth Mainland bridge and request that work on it should be expedited. The private sector should be involved in all facets of decongestion exercise and motivated to boost dispersion to the rural areas. Employment opportunities should be extended to the non-urban segments of Lagos State. The federal government should strive to stimulate industrial and commercial growth in other parts of the country to reduce the soaring migration to Lagos. Most importantly, the security network should be expanded to cover practically all communities to deter criminals who now invade isolated suburbs where police patrols are non- existent. The task of Lagos decongestion requires an increase in the local governments to at least forty councils. If Kano State has 45 local councils, Katsina 34, Oyo 33, Akwa Ibom 30 and Delta 25 local councils, it is patently unfair to peg Lagos State to barely 20 local councils. With effective grassroots mobilisation, the current high population density can be rationalised and the quality of life significantly transformed.
