The swarm of vehicles is enormous. Hundreds of cars fight to make their way between motorized tricycles, potholes in the asphalt, pedestrians who weave through the traffic jam in a hurry, young people who offer trinkets to trapped drivers, and rickety vans that are a kind of private buses and stop wherever they want. A boy with short dreadlocks shouts at the top of his lungs the destination his van is headed to from the open side door, waves some crumpled bills in his hand and hunts down a couple of customers, who jump into the vehicle. The concert of screams, horns and acceleration provides a soundtrack to the traffic chaos and Kingsley Ajagbonwu becomes desperate. Nigerian journalist and pastor, Ajagbonwu observes from inside his car, through the window, how a monster city shakes. Because the Nigerian Lagos, the most populated city in Africa with around 24.5 million inhabitants (there has been no official census for 17 years) is more than a city, it is a beast of unleashed cement. “You see it? Everywhere you look you see very young boys and girls looking for a life. Every day there are more. They come from other parts of the country, many from rural areas, or even from neighboring countries such as Benin, Cameroon or Ghana and seek to get ahead. The city of Lagos has become a magnet for young people trying to build a future; Lagos is the New York of Africa.”
Lagos, the economic lung of Nigeria, is also a window to the future. At the current rate of growth – adding up to 2,000 residents daily – the city in southern Nigeria will become the most populated city on the planet at the end of the century with 88.3 million inhabitants. The magnitude of the figure surpasses the word city: for comparison, the Metropolitan Area of ??Barcelona currently has 3.3 million inhabitants.
For Nigerian professor Sunday Adedini, from the department of Demography and Social Statistics at the Federal University Oye-Ekiti and author of a study on the growth of Lagos, the city faces notable challenges in the short-term future. “Unfortunately, infrastructure development or service delivery is not keeping pace with the growth of the urban population in Nigeria. Millions of residents face enormous challenges such as housing shortages and overcrowding. Poverty, air and noise pollution, insecurity, increased crime and environmental degradation are others,” he explains.
You just have to take a walk through the streets of Lagos to come face to face with inequality. The city combines neighborhoods of the most excessive luxury, with skyscrapers and yachts moored in front of the most exclusive restaurants, with urban shantytowns or emaciated buildings, without water or electricity, where the disinherited are crowded together. They are almost the majority: 49% of the population of Lagos lives in informal neighborhoods and 42% lives in poverty.
But if poor neighborhoods absorb the largest number of newcomers from rural areas – according to the World Bank, in 2050 70% of Nigeria’s population will live in urban areas – it is in the rich neighborhoods where the unbridled growth of city. On the coast, a web of cranes and trucks work around the clock to build entire neighborhoods and respond to the demand for housing. On Victoria Island, Banana Island or Lekki there are hundreds of luxury apartments, recently finished or half-built, still waiting for tenants.
In reality, Lagos illustrates a continental phenomenon. With a very young population, with an average age of 18.9 years, Africa is the continent with the fastest demographic growth in the world and its evolution is exponential: if in 1950 the population of the African continent represented only 10% of the global figure, by the middle of this century one in every four inhabitants of the world will have been born in African lands. According to the United Nations, the continent will exceed 2.5 billion inhabitants in the next two decades. The result will be megacities almost like Lagos. According to a report from the University of Toronto, in the year 2100, 13 of the 20 most populous cities in the world will be African. Currently there are only two.
