Lagos – Centre of Excellence

It is past 2 o’clock on a Thursday night and I should be tucked up in bed attending to my beauty sleep. Instead, I am wide-awake, having just gotten home from a bar across on VI where the beautiful people of Lagos fraternize. But this is certainly not what gave me second wind, nor was it the ride across the dark mainland bridge with my newfound friend the cab driver mr. T.O. who possesses one of the most rickety car wrecks in town… oh no, the source of my adrenaline rush was the sight of a giant cockroach in my bedroom. Despite spending the night in a lounge full of Lagos big men, the only taker for sharing my bedspace ended up being a cockroach - now that is pretty ironic. Having said that, judging from its sheer size, it could loosely be called a Lagos big boy of sorts, so I won’t complain.

Besides, I intend to analyze a beast of a different kind tonight, in fact why not throw the whole of Lagos under a magnifying glass and dissect. Yesterday the city experienced one of its world-famous go-slows, whereby it took one of my colleagues 5 hours to go from the mainland to Lekki. The reason was a political rally around the national stadium and this caused the whole city to clog up and spend their night honking their horns at other cars at a standstill in powerless exasperation. Now that election time is coming closer there will be more of this type of entertainment I am sure. In the end, even the most refined Lagosians had to give up their air-conditioned SUVs with drivers and brave the pavement, or god forbid take an okada, to somehow get home.

Speaking of okadas, there is a new law in Lagos that bikes must not be seen out after 7pm or before 7am. This means everyone is rushing to get home before the curfew as the machines however irritating and dangerous are a vital mode of transport - most people take them once they get off their bus stop to get close to where they live. This new measure is meant to improve safety at night – apparently there were a lot of okada robberies, i.e. people on bikes robbing cars and pedestrians – but a side effect of the regulation is that the already impossible traffic situation has just got even more unbearable: the whole of Lagos trying to get to work or home at the same time.

Today people were joking that probably even the LASTMA officials (traffic police), the okadas’ biggest enemies, were getting on bikes to get home yesterday night. And rumour has it LASTMA is really taking its task of fining the offenders seriously by never missing a chance to stop an erring driver and demand a dash to let them go. It is growing into a fine side business for the officials who can complement their measly salaries with this new source of windfall, the only slight problem being that like most regulatory initiatives it will just open up yet another avenue for corruption rather than be enforced and create order in the chaos of this disintegrated metropolis, whose tagline btw. is Lagos – centre of excellence.

And although Lagos may at first glance not strike you as a centre of excellence in any shape or form it has actually been appreciated by none other than the granddaddy of modern urban architecture, Rem Kolhaas. He took his Harvard students to Lagos on a series of research trips to study this urban phenomenon and concluded that Lagos may stand as a model for the urban development of mega-cities in the future - pioneering a sort of needs-based urbanism where ad-hoc marketplaces are created as and when a mass of people spontaneously congregate in a go-slow, and dissolve as soon as the bottleneck disappears.

And excellence can manifest itself in many different ways, for example I believe that Nigerians are very enterprising indeed - for every new obstacle presented to them, they’ll find a loophole or a way to capitalize on their little corner of influence. If there were legitimate possibilities abound in this country so much creative potential could be harnessed, but as it is, a lot of it is sadly converted into schemes and scams instead. Nevertheless, it does take true survivalists to cope in good old Naija, with no welfare systems or safety nets for its citizens, it is amazing that people get by and continue their daily struggle with a smile.