USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Our Cities, Our Future

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-----Original Message-----
From: Tunde Oseni <tundeoseni@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 18:35:53
To: ayo_olukotun<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
Subject: Our Cities, Our Future

Our Cities, Our Future
Ayo Olukotun

'The City is now the main driver of growth and stability across
Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia' Seth Kaplan, 2014

The countryside invites us by proximity to nature, its leeway of time,
space, and fresh air. The city, on the other hand, fascinates by its
concentration of amenities, the symbols of modern life, the sheer
density of human traffic. As the opening quote shows, the city with
all its uncertainties is increasingly not just in the developing world
but globally the wave of the future. Over half of mankind now lives in
cities. And in an age of globalization and destination branding,
cities play an important role in international affairs far beyond
their purview.

In Nigeria, it is projected that by next year Lagos, which harbors 21
million out of the country's 170 million people, will become the
world's third largest city. Similarly, other cities such as Kaduna,
Port Harcourt and Abuja increasingly concentrate within their
territories, thanks to griping rural decay, swathes of citizens.

Despite their rising profile, however, our cities, their governance,
regeneration, quality of life, aesthetics, and planning have featured
little in national conversation. One influential method of indexing
the health of cities is to measure the quality of life defined by
housing, climate, infrastructure, crime rate, and education. For
example, the Mercer survey on the quality of life of cities is
employed by multinational corporations to determine the compensation
that they pay to their employees computed according to the difference
between their home countries and the host nations to which they are
deployed. In other words, employees of these companies who have to
earn their living in countries where the costs of living are high and
quality of life low, get higher compensation.

Obviously, our cities notwithstanding the recent spate of urban
renewal policies score low on infrastructure, quality of life; they
also feature high crime rate. Lagos, under Governors Bola Tinubu and
Babatunde Fashola, witnessed a fair amount of transformation in such
areas as slump clearing, municipal transportation, beautification, and
imaginative attempt to put in place a world class 'city within a city'
in the shape of Eko Atlantic City, modeled after Manhattan in New
York.

It goes without saying, however, that much remains to be done in
moving Lagos away from what one writer describes as ' a crime-ridden
seething mass of humanity crammed into the steaming lagoons of
Southwest Nigeria'. In the same vein, and although the crime rate has
dipped in recent years, two out of three Lagosians do not have
reliable access to clean drinking water, electricity and other
amenities. This is another way of saying that the brief of Fashola's
successor, is well cut out: pushing the ongoing urban regeneration
programme beyond its current limits as well as easing more the woes of
commuters and citizens generally. This by no means easy task is made
more difficult by the skewed nature of the country's political economy
which relegates Lagos to a status that is not commensurate with its
special needs. Much was heard some years back of the building of the
Gateway City in Ogun State that would relieve Lagos of some of its
choking pressure but the agenda appears to have fallen into disuse.

Other cities such as Kaduna may not have Lagos' mega problems but they
have more than a fair share of lags associated with soaring
population, chaotic expansion and corresponding pressure on social
amenities. Kaduna, to be sure, is an urban planner's delight. Like
Abuja, the federal capital, it was a deliberately planned city
favoured by its proximity to the Kaduna River, which runs horizontally
across it. In earlier times, it had some of the makings of a sub-urban
idyll or of an American campus writ large. Obviously, the growth of
shanty settlements at the fringes of the city, erosion of amenities,
issues with waste disposal and especially recurrent violence have
rendered it less of a tourist attraction that it potentially was.

Matters are not helped by the straitjacket of our allocative
federalism in which the bulk of allocations are spent on emoluments
and salaries leaving little for imaginative urban development. A
renewal agenda for Kaduna will seek to connect the city by high speed
rail to the international airport and to other Nigerian cities,
increase the green belt land, explore such options as solar power and
wind power, revitalize prostrate industries as well as create
employment for its teeming youth population who are easy recruits for
insurgent activities. This will of course also include the provision
of an efficient waste management system with a component of turning
wastes to fertilizer in order to boost agricultural activities.

Kaduna, once the pleasurable resort of the northern power elite
famously known as Kaduna Mafia had a thriving intellectual culture
around Arewa House, and the now defunct New Nigerian newspaper,
catalyzed by its proximity to the once buoyant academic culture of
Ahmadu Bello University. Sadly, not much is heard these days of the
clear articulate voices that enlivened national conversations from
those quarters.

Abuja, the federal capital, has come dawn, in spite of being
meticulously planned with special problems of its own. These are
related to the existence of a growing squatter population, and
frenzied expansion, which have completely defaced the original design
of the city; impossibly high cost of rent, and dizzying pressure on
amenities. It also has little to show in the direction of an
intellectual culture such as, one finds happily, in Port Harcourt,
which is the UNESCO World Book capital for 2014.

Port Harcourt, for some years now, is fast becoming a haven for
artists, publishers, creators of film and the literati generally, thus
increasing its potential allure as a tourist attraction. This brings
us to another concept in the renewal of cities namely that of the
intelligent or smart city. Indeed, there are now international surveys
which rank cities according to their intellectual capital denoted by
the volume of book sales, libraries per capita; ratio of higher
institutions to the population as well as problem-solving capacity.
This is an area in which our cities are lamentably deficient
considering the disrepair to which our public libraries are falling,
the shortage of think tanks and policy advisory groups and the virtual
collapse a reading infrastructure.

Why is this important? Precisely because the ideas that will
regenerate city governance are expected to come from the intellectual
infrastructure resident in these cities. As the editor of the Daily
Beast which publishes an annual survey on 'smart cities' expressed it,
'a city's potential lies mostly with the ingenuity and brain power of
its citizens, regions with intellectual vigour are likely to bounce
back, those without risk stupor'. Consequently, the city of Ibadan
which has a decided intellectual infrastructure featuring
universities, policy and research institutes, and a wealth of book
publishing houses has lately experienced under its current governor an
impressive facelift and aesthetic upgrading. The challenge, however,
is to extend that project into the intellectual arena such that the
gown can complement the town and the city's civic engagement quotient
driven by policy ideas can in turn enhance good governance.

Overall, all our cities stand to benefit by increasing their
intellectual capital in order to revitalize governance.


* Olukotun is Professor of Political Science and Dean, Faculty of the
Social Sciences, Lead City University, Ibadan

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