Nigeria is the most urbanized country in Africa and the southwestern and north-western parts of the country bear the mark of decay arising from the long history of urbanization without much planning and consequently needing urban renewal most.
The point needs to be made that the totality of urban Nigeria needs some kind of a Marshall Plan of tearing up and reconstructing to put us in the 21st century. Before the advent of colonialism, the pattern of settlements in the two most affected parts of Nigeria was large urban and mainly city kingdoms and hierarchical political organizations. In the Northwest, one had city kingdoms like Kano, Katsina, Daura, Kebbi and Zazzau( Zaria) and in the Southwest, one had Lagos, Oyo, Ibadan, Ife, Ogbomoso, Abeokuta, Shaki, Ijebu Ode, Benin, Ilesha, Akure and the various Ekiti city kingdoms.
The Southwest remains the most urbanized part of Nigeria and Africa. There were other puny settlements even in some of the regions identified as places of considerable urbanisation but they would not qualify to be described as urban settlements before the coming of colonialism. Such settlements which later developed into urban settlements include Bauchi, Gombe, Maiduguri, Wukari and Yola. In the Niger Delta were to be found the small Itshekiri settlement of Warri and further east were to be found Nri, Onitsha and the coastal city states of Bonny, Abonema etc . But I am more concerned in this preamble with the precolonial conurbations – not the ones that developed following the colonial intervention as important as they may be.
With the coming of the British and their interest mainly in trade, several trading centres sprang up and developed into towns and cities and the precolonial cities and kingdoms expanded into cities and urban conurbations. New ones like Maiduguri, Yola, Makurdi, Gusau, Sokoto, Kontagora, Jebba, Lokoja and Jos expanded or sprang up and have grown into administrative centres of states in modern Nigeria. What is true of the north is true of the south and particularly of the Southwest and the Southeast and the Niger Delta as well.
In the North-central part of Nigeria, old towns like Ilorin, Bida, Lokoja became administrative centres. Colonial cities like Makurdi, Enugu, Owerri, Aba, Port Harcourt, Jos, Kaduna, Maiduguri and Minna have now joined old cities like Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Abeokuta, Katsina, Sokoto, Ilorin Osogbo, Ilesha, Ado Ekiti and Zaria to add to the collection of towns and cities undergoing decay albeit of different proportion needing urban renewal of one type or the other. Our job has therefore been cut out for us because urban decay becomes visible when one travels the length and breadth of Nigeria.
I believe where to start is from the easiest of the problems which is infrastructural upgrade of our urban environment and city roads. This belongs in the constitutional province of the states which had usually abandoned their responsibilities to the federal government. The states should be persuaded to earmark at least 20 percent of their annual budgets for the next ten years for upgrading the roads, sewage, street lights, gutters, markets and greening of the cities and demanding ventilation of all the houses where they do not have little things like windows especially at a time when meteorologists have predicted global warming.
Cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Oyo, Ilesa, Ile-Ife, Ilorin, Ijebu Ode, Akure, Ado Ekiti, Benin, Warri, Onitsha, Aba, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Zaria, Sokoto, Jos, Bauchi, Yola, and Maiduguri have serious tasks to deal with. The yardstick of success is to find out how liveable these places have become after a decade. If life continues in this dreary and harsh environments as it is now, it means more work needs to be done. But this is where to start at the village and city levels in all the states of the federation.
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We must have a strategy to develop this country from bottom up. All the talk in Abuja is not affecting anybody but the politicians in the parliament and the executive and MDAS and their various parastatals. If we are able to improve the living standards of the people by making their environment much more tolerable than it is now, this country will be on the giant march to physical development. We can begin this journey from January next year instead of beating about the bush about what to do. When states are busy with their herculean task, they will all be united on the demand for structural reforms of this Humpty Dumpty of a nation called Nigeria. The positive part of this suggestion is the massive jobs it would create.
The federal government will be left with the hard task of picking up the pieces of infrastructural development of the federation such as building railroads, ports, harbours, airports and houses at a massive level as well as infrastructure for communication and electricity without which a country cannot develop. If the federal government is challenged by what goes on at state levels, then we will have a cooperative and competitive federalism that we had in the first republic. All this will require a level of social and political mobilisation necessary for overall development. This will require all hands being on the deck and massive job opportunities leading to near full employment and with jobs being made available, insecurity will reduce if not disappear entirely. Inflation may accompany these enterprises but the situation will stabilise overtime if we shut ourselves from unnecessary importation which is the bane of modern day life in Nigeria today.
What is the aim of government if not the happiness of the people being governed? . Development is all about people. The point is that very few people are happy in the Nigeria of today. I do not blame the present government or even the previous one. Our problems have been caused by the cumulative maladministration of all the governments since the coup d’état of 1966. It is not only young Nigerians who are finding some kind of solace in emigration; we the parents left behind are living a sad life. We cannot see our children except on WhatsApp and the internet. Many of us have become recluses and only come out to go to mosques and churches. Many are now selling family heirlooms and houses for fear of what happens to our properties when our souls join the souls triumphant.
Even while still alive, the harshness of lives without flowing water and electricity has made life unnecessarily unliveable. Even people who used to have air conditioning are now abandoning them because of erratic electricity and the galloping cost of power. In short, this is not the best of times for all of us and we need to see the government addressing the difficulties confronting Nigerians who just merely want to live a life worth living away from our present existence.
