Among the many sins of the Black people, none stands out more conspicuously than their inability to build or sustain durable nation-states. Only very few African nations are sustainable in their current configuration. In western diplomatic circuits, the standard joke is that Africans don’t do nations. As proof, they point to the sorry mess on the continent and out of the continent in Haiti where the African psyche finally overwhelmed African heroism.
In the more extreme version of this Afro-dismissal, the entire continent is seen as being merely there to make up the number. As a writer famously put it, humankind first evolved in Africa, but they have not continued to do so there. In such circles, Africa is seen as a historic digression and Africans an evolutionary bye-pass in the course of human evolution.
It is a scary proposition, this thesis that shuts out a whole race and the founding continent of humanity. One of the debilities pointed out is the inability of African nations to create and configure modern institutions that will sustain and nurture the neo-colonial state foisted on the continent and its people by imperialist conquest and subjugation. Needless to add that this sin flows from the original sin, the colonial contraptions foisted on Africa in the name of nations, or what Basil Davidson has famously described as the Blackman’s burden.
If we discount the use of illness as an alibi as newly perfected by Nigerian elites when the law catches up with them, the greatest sin of Africa’s post-colonial elites is their inability to create and sustain great cities and megalopolis which will serve as a cultural, economic and technological hub for the rest of the nation and the continent at large.
In what is now a celebrated encounter with the Lagos epic gridlock, The Economist correspondent put the blame for the resumption of traffic anarchy on the streets of Lagos on the incompetence and inadequacies of the new governor, Akinwumi Ambode, who in his estimate has so far been unable to match the proactive vigour and sheer reforming energy of his immediate predecessor.
It is possible that the correspondent of The Economist wrote out of turn and out of anger without doing his research or homework. He did not bother to find out what was actually going on. This has brought a gale of furious recriminations accusing the iconic London magazine of neo-colonial journalism. Taken together, this is just as it should be, for it shows that many Nigerians are bothered about the state and condition of the greatest conurbation of black people anywhere in the world.
The best way to go is to tackle the matter from the root in order to show why Lagos matters to Nigeria and to Africa and the black person. Are Africans truly incapable of creating and sustaining great cities? If we insist that early European explorers of the fifteenth and eighteenth century spoke of the wide well-paved streets of Ilesa, the neat perpendicular avenues of Benin and the sprawling amphitheatre of old Oyo town, it may be dismissed as foolish romanticization.
But the fact remains that when the Portuguese adventurers arrived at the old Kongo kingdom around present day Angola around the middle of the fifteenth century, they met a political organization and social structure at par if not superior to the one they left at home. They loitered around a bit hoping to have a glimpse of the mighty army that underwrote the flourishing kingdom. Alas, old Africans didn’t do matching military either. And since God marches on the side of the bigger battalion, virtually all the inhabitants of the kingdom were captured and transported to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda.
In the event, the old kingdom was to suffer three different types of colonial rationalization: Portuguese, French and Belgian. There can be no bigger recipe for millennial disorientation and dysfunction. In his leopard cap and resplendent costume complete with barbers daily imported to Gbadolite from Paris, Joseph Mobutu reminded one of the old Belgian minister of the interior famously captured in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness who superintended the systemic brutalization of a race while being elegantly and nattily turned out. Yet by 1901, the indigenous city state of Abeokuta had solved the problem of sanitation and peaceful order.
There is a sense then in which it can be argued that Lagos is the once and future capital of Nigeria, nay of Africa and the Black race. We do not mean capital in the pedestrian capitalist modernist sense but in the sense of a cultural, economic and technological hub of a nation, a continent and the whole Black race.
This is why Lagos means so much to many, with the astral aura of greatness as an authentic African megalopolis hovering over it. It should be noted that Lagos did not start out as the capital of amalgamated Nigeria and neither has it ended up as the commanding capital of a harshly unitarist nation. But there can be no doubting its continuing relevance as the cultural, technological and economic powerhouse of the nation and indeed tropical Africa as a whole.
There are at least three other great African mega-cities that could have served the same purpose: Cairo in Egypt, Johannesburg in South Africa and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But while Johannesburg lacks an authentic African feel, Cairo is hobbled by religious and cultural constraints whereas the sprawling anarchic human conurbation of Kinshasa has unraveled under the strain of a thriving kleptocracy and endemic political disorder.
Lagos seems to have been specially prepared for its destiny. Originally a flourishing fishing, trading and farming outpost, the modern name was a Portuguese reenactment of home abroad. The city has since grown exponentially taking in mammoth waves of settlers as it survived colonial slave raiders, a civil war, colonial bombardment and a protracted intellectual, political and cultural duel between its coastal elites and the colonial authorities fought out in pamphlets and newspapers which shaped and defined its character and possibilities as a Black Mecca of freedom and enlightenment.
With its Yoruba and later Benin nucleus and influx of Nupe settlers, Hausa traders, Brazilian returnees, Sierra-Leonean recaptives, West African fortune-seekers and the Igbo people, this colonial and post-colonial hybridity has helped to foster a sense of oneness and belonging for all bar a few hiccups arising from competition for increasingly scarce resources. This delicate mix should not be overturned in the name of ethnic jingoism or cultural revanchism.
No other African metropolis can boast of this kaleidoscopic potpourri. This is why Lagos has set the pace for the rest of the country, whether it is colonial politics, the decolonizing project, fashion, music, literature and post-colonial razzmatazz. The most iconic picture one can boast of is that of the late regally resplendent Oba of Lagos, Adeyinka Oyekan circa 1966, waltzing with the famous Caribbean singing diva, Millicent Small. It was a class act at the summit of sophistication and culture.
Also as if by some divine or mystical coincidence, Lagos parades an illustrious gallery of former military and civilian rulers: from Mobolaji Johnson, the late Navy Commodore Lawal, the indefatigable Admiral Godwin Ndubuisi Kanu, the iconic Lateef Jakande to the late Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru. But it is with the advent of the Fourth Republic and the financial wizardry and modernizing genius of Bola Ahmed Tinubu that Lagos finally came into its own in terms of breakneck development consolidated by his tough and doughty successor, Babatunde Raji Fashola.
This is where the current Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has his work cut out for him. If he appears slow and tardy in coming away from the starting block, if he appears to have been remiss in darting away at the sound of the referee’s whistle , it may well be because the methodical accountant in the governor has been taking a mental and fiscal audit of the Lagos project in its entirety. The truth also is that the Lagos APC command centre which ought to have nudged the governor appeared to have been distracted by the protracted and unproductive politics surrounding President Buhari’s cabinet.
But if that were to be the case, the return of traffic gridlock and unruly motorists, cyclists and criminal urchins to the streets of Lagos tells its own story. It goes to show why and how the institutionalization of human habits and behavioural patterns often matters even more than the enforcing personnel. Institutions are a function of repeated habits and gestures with instant state reprisals for offenders burnt into the human consciousness. If putative offenders know that no matter how long it takes the long arm of the law will finally catch up with them, they will think twice.
Yet it is also axiomatic that no straight furniture can be procured from crooked timber. Without documented data and a functioning electronic pool of drivers, commercial or otherwise, tracking offenders is going to be a Herculean task. Many will offend simply to re-offend. And in a parlous economy bristling with bitter inequity asking the police, LASTMA officials and members of the Road Safety Corps not to take or demand bribe is a tall order indeed.
While pursuing institutionalized order through constant education and enlightenment programmes for road users through organs of mass dissemination, Ambode should not be afraid of wielding the big stick on offenders while purging the worst miscreants from the services. Nigerians are a hardy and hardened lot and if all humankind are angels, there would have been no need for government.
Having said all this, the time has come for the federal authorities to see Lagos as a special national project which is beyond the scope and resources of a particular state government. With a population approaching four medium-sized states of the federation, it is time for Nigeria to revisit the structural and constitutional anomaly which groups Lagos together with other states.
A Lagos megalopolis of the immediate future must have an underground metro which will rival the best efforts in Europe, Asia and America. It must also be self-sufficient in the generation and production of its own electricity needs. Needless to add that this cannot be handled by the state but in partnership with the private sector. It will be recalled that the first time these ameliorative projects were contemplated, they were summarily scuttled by unitarist governments whose sole concerns seem to be the forcible uniformity of growth for the different components of the nation.
Going forward and given this sorry history of unitarist and statist governance in Nigeria, we must now repeat the original question. Can the Black person do great cities? Of course yes, and Lagos is going to be the stellar exemplar. Rather than relying on a solitary state, a megalopolis is often the product of the explosion of human vitality and multifarious talents convulsing and concussing together as they break through man-made barriers and artificial boundaries all within the bounds of law and order.
Given the great developmental strides Lagos has taken in the last forty years and in particular the last one and a half decades, it should be clear that no human principality can stop a megalopolis whose time has come. The rough edges will eventually be straightened out. The history of human development has shown that timeless cities often trump temporal states and transient authorities. No matter the future configuration of Nigeria, Lagos is the destined capital of the Black race.
