Chapter one. The spatial and demographic contexts of infrastructure development in colonial and postcolonial Lagos
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Texte intégral
Infrastructure and Development: An Overview
1“Infrastructure” has been defined as “the basic structures and facilities necessary for a country or an organization to function efficiently, e.g. buildings, transport, water and energy resources, and administrative systems.”1 In general terms, it refers to the economic and social facilities which are provided by the government, or by private sector operators, for the social and economic development of the individual and the society at large. In other contexts, such facilities are described as “social services”2; but this usage will not be adopted in this work partly because of its scope and also because of certain connotations inherent in it. The principal one is the tendency to regard the provision of such services as a social responsibility of government, which implicitly denies or minimizes private sector participation. Social services are seen as “indicators of development”, by which development is seen “in terms of meeting… [the people’s] basic needs within their socio-cultural environment.”3 In other words, the term is rather state-centric. As Onokerhoraye noted, “a social service is identified as a service in which the various levels of government in the country as well as various communities are collectively involved in its provision.”4 Deriving from this is the implication that “social services,” at least as provided by the state or community, cannot or should not be for profit. Hence, they are viewed as “services provided largely for a social motive in terms of fulfilling the needs of a specific segment of the population rather than for economic motive.”5 In any case, “social services” cover matters such as recreation and tourist services, personal welfare, health services, housing and education, which are not of primary concern in this study, and which do not qualify for categorization as “infrastructure.” Consequently, for the subjects considered in this volume, we have opted for the neutral term “infrastructure” and we shall be dealing with those facilities that may be described as “social infrastructure.”
2Even so, the role of the state in the provision of infrastructure and urban facilities will receive due attention in the chapters that follow, especially as this work focuses in part on official policies. This is understandable in that the three facilities to be examined in metropolitan Lagos required considerable capital outlays. This consideration has always been a critical factor in the preponderance of state involvement in the provision of infrastructure. However, as we shall see in the case of urban transport in Lagos, there has been an exception to this rule as private sector participation has taken the lion’s share of investment in the provision of urban transport facilities, at least since the 1960s. This is attributable to the comparatively low capital entry requirement in the transport sector. For example, the price of a single motorcycle or (second-hand) bus is still within the reach of the enterprising individual. Conversely, in the water services sector, the cost of acquiring the necessary equipment, such as water tankers, or constructing and maintaining boreholes and power plants, for generating electricity, or providing water for commercial purposes, generally exceeds the capacity of all but the richest individuals. In any case, as this study will show, there is an expanding scope for entrepreneurial activity in each of the sectors of infrastructure development. While the role of the state will diminish further in certain sectors (urban transport), it will continue to be significant in others (water and electricity) in view of the high costs of installation and maintenance of large-scale infrastructure projects (such as dams and power stations). Even in the transport sector, the diminution of state involvement will vary from one branch to another. Thus, while private operators easily surpass the government in running urban motor transport services, they are not likely to do so in urban rail service, which is far more costly to establish and operate.
3Scholars have debated the role of physical and social infrastructure in development without reaching a definitive consensus on their importance relative to other dynamics in human development. But it cannot be denied that “there is a high positive correlation between a developed infrastructure and sustained high rates of economic growth and trade coupled with a significant reduction in poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.”6 Nigeria’s colonial governor, Frederick Lugard, had declared pointedly that “the material development of Africa may be summed up in one word – transport.”7 Though he could be accused of monocausality – attributing a historical phenomenon to a single cause – his position is buttressed by the decisive role of the railways in the economic transformation of such important colonial territories as India and Nigeria.
4As a general rule, railways have always been crucial to the “opening up” of vast hinterlands, as was the case in North America. But it is important to stress that the railway acted in conjunction with other factors, without which it could not have made the kind of impact it did. Specifically, railways, or any other facility, are useless without a productive population or an economically viable hinterland. In Nigeria, for example, the Lagos-Kano line was sustained by the densely populated and economically well-endowed hinterland in Yorubaland and the Kano region. Road transport has also played an important role in the movement of persons and goods, at least since the early twentieth century. This was recognized in the colonial Nigerian context by Walter Egerton, governor of Southern Nigeria from 1905 to 1912. He had declared: “If you ask what my policy is, I should say, “Open means of communication” and if you would wish for additional information, I would reply “Open more of them.”8
5However, it may be noted that some dissenters deny that physical infrastructure facilities, such as transport, play the kind of overwhelmingly important role in human affairs that has been attributed to them. It is argued that infrastructure, by creating an enabling environment, exerts a permissive rather than a decisive impact on human development.9 Both positions can be buttressed with empirical evidence and this necessitates the specification of the context of analysis to determine the impact exerted by them. This then calls for some clarification of what constitutes “infrastructure,” particularly in a limited urban setting like Lagos.
6As a rough typology, a distinction may be drawn between physical infrastructure (such as roads, dams, canals and railways) and public utilities (such as electricity, potable water, sanitation and sewage), and between economic and social infrastructure. While the aforementioned facilities can pass for economic infrastructure, health and educational facilities, such as hospitals and schools, constitute social infrastructure. However, the three facilities under consideration - water supply, electricity and transportation - combine elements of economic and social infrastructure. These facilities will be shown to have exerted a significant affect on, or ameliorated the lives of, urban dwellers in the Lagos metropolitan area in Southwestern Nigeria. Our interest will be in the official policies which informed the provision of such facilities, the politics of such plans, the cost of providing the facilities, the manner of usage, the spatial as well as social coverage of the facilities, and the users’ responses to the quality and cost of services. We shall also be interested in both the social and economic impacts of these facilities, thus rejecting a narrowly focused preoccupation with the “welfare impact [of social services] on Nigerians rather than on their economic implications.”10
7In spite of the demonstrable importance of urban infrastructure, only passing reference has been made to it in the literature on Lagos; indeed, there is no specific study of this subject till now.11 In examining the history of infrastructure policies and urban facilities in Lagos, this work focuses on water supply, electricity and urban transport. It sheds light on the differential and complementary roles of government and private sector operators, and especially on recent trends indicating a steady retreat of the state from the provision of urban infrastructure. This work combines the chronological and thematic approaches to capture the highlights of the general and sectoral changes in the social and urban life in West Africa. It opens with a general review of developments before focusing on specific aspects of the subject. This study takes a long-term view of the topic from the establishment of the British colony at Lagos in 1861 to 2000, to highlight continuity and change in the history of the urban facilities under study. To provide a proper framework for the study, we shall next focus on two critical determinants of the usage and spread of the three urban facilities: human population and the spatial expansion of the city.
Lagos: The Emergence of West Africa’s Leading Commercial, Industrial and Maritime Hub
8The port-city of Lagos was a notorious centre of the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the background to the intervention of the British, culminating in the establishment of a colony in 1861, a watershed in the history of what was once a fishing settlement. The subsequent history of the community may be divided into two major periods: the era of colonial rule (1861-1960); and the post-Independence period, from 1960.12 All through this period, colonial and indigenous authorities fashioned out infrastructure policies in line with the cosmopolitan (multi-racial) composition of the city and its rising population consequent upon its emergence as the leading port-city of Nigeria and West Africa and, between 1914 and 1991, as Nigeria’s national capital.
9As might be expected, during the second half of the nineteenth century Lagos was a small and compact community which covered less than two square miles on Lagos Island (See Map 1). Its population was also modest, rising from 25, 083 persons in 1866 to 37,452 in 1881 and 41,487 in 1901. By 1911, the boundary of the Lagos metropolitan area had been extended to cover eighteen square miles, encompassing Lagos Island itself and Apapa and Ebute Metta on the mainland. Concomitantly, the population had risen to 73, 766, a figure which justified the reference to Lagos as the “Liverpool” of West Africa. By 1931, the aerial extent of the city had further increased to 24.24 square miles and Lagos had come to assume “a more commercial role and its presence began to be felt in the neighbourhood.”13 In response to the political, social and economic dynamics in the city and in its hinterland, the population of Lagos rose steadily, to 98,303 in 1921, 126,474 in 1931, 230,256 in 1950 and 655,246 in 1963. Today, the metropolitan area of Lagos has expanded phenomenally to cover approximately 100 square miles while the current population is in the range of ten to twelve million persons.14
10The steady rise in the population of Lagos derived from the influx of Saro (Sierra Leonian) and Brazilian repatriates and liberated slaves, the cessation of civil wars in the Yoruba hinterland, the subsequent expansion of British rule to the area, the development of the port and the growth of local commerce and overseas trade. Conversely, adverse developments, such as the influenza pandemic of the immediate post-World War I years and the commercial slump which culminated in the Great Depression of 1929-34, caused a decline in the population of the city in 1931, compared with 1911. In effect, barring this isolated period, Lagos experienced a steady population growth through much of the twentieth century. The most spectacular growth during this period was recorded in the second half of the century: 400, 000 people were added to the population of the city itself in 1950-63, while its suburbs gained some 390,000 inhabitants. By 1963, Lagos and its suburbs had a total population of over one million persons, the first city in West Africa to attain that mark.15 Yet, the population was not evenly distributed across the expanding metropolis. As shown in the table below, some areas had begun to experience congestion as far back as 1931. However, the situation was dynamic, for while some 65 per cent of the people lived on the Island by 1950, the position had been reversed by 1963 when 68 per cent of the inhabitants of Lagos resided on the mainland, encompassing Yaba, Ebute Metta, Surulere, Mushin, Ikeja, Agege and Ajeromi.
MAPI: LAGOS IN 1850

Source: Adapted from: A kin L. Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria, London. 1968, p. 260 and Margaret PeiL Lagos: The City is the People, London 1991, p. 17.
TABLE 1.1: POPULATION DENSITY IN METROPOLITAN LAGOS, 1931

Source: S.M. Jacob, Census of Nigeria 1931, vol. 1, London: Crown Agents, 1933, cited in I. A. Adalemo, “The Physical Growth of Metropolitan Lagos and Associated Planning Problems,” in D.A. Oyeleye (ed.), Spatial Expansion and Concomitant Problems in the Lagos Metropolitan Area (An Example of a Rapidly Urbanizing Area), Lagos: Department of Geography, University of Lagos, 1981, p. 11, Table 3.
11An important feature of Lagos society was the spatial segregation of the settlement since the nineteenth century (See Map 2). By 1890, the city (then limited to the island) consisted of four distinct quarters inhabited by different racial and/or social groups. The Europeans inhabited the Marina, described as “the most important street of Lagos”16; the Brazilian repatriates lived at Portuguese Town or Popo Aguda; the Saro or “Sierra Leonians” (recaptives or liberated slaves from Sierra Leone) lived at Olowogbowo; the indigenous Lagosians occupied the rest of the island. Echeruo remarked that “for all practical purposes the sophisticated and expanding parts of the town were Faji and Portuguese Town.”17 By 1929, there was a clear residential segregation on both sides of the Macgregor Canal based virtually along racial lines. On one side was the densely populated African settlement and on the other, the European residential area at Ikoyi, with police and army barracks and a few indigenous villages.18 For much of the colonial period, urban facilities were concentrated in the European residential areas and in the areas where public offices were located.
12From the colonial period, the city of Lagos had expanded remarkably as its population increased, particularly with the influx of Yoruba and non-Yoruba (Igbo, Izon, Edo, Hausa etc.) from the late 1930s. However, the spatial expansion of the metropolis was not wholly regulated. On the island, expansion was facilitated by reclamation schemes which resulted in the sandfilling of swamps and lagoons which had posed a threat to the health of the people. In response to the bubonic plagues of 1924-30, entire neighbourhoods were evacuated, swamps (such as at Oko Awo) were drained and people re-settled on the mainland. This was the genesis of the establishment of the Yaba and Ebute Metta housing schemes and the emergence of the Lagos Executive Development Board (L.E.D.B.) as the agency for town planning and urban renewal in Lagos. In spite of such efforts, unregulated urban development prevailed. The massive influx of people and the poor enforcement of town planning laws, especially in the new areas on the mainland, vitiated efforts at proper town planning. This is understandable since the government was not the only provider of housing. Moreover, the communities on the urban fringe of Lagos – Ajeromi, Mushin, Shomolu, Ikeja, Agege and Oshodi – were administered by rural district councils which lacked the legal and material capability to undertake town planning. These communities then became havens for private developers, who took advantage of the situation to embark on an unregulated provision of housing.
MAP 2: LAGOS IN 1900

Source: Adapted from: Akin L. Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria, London, 1968, p. 260 and Margaret Peil, Lagos: The City is the People, London 1991, p. 17.
13In 1952, the Western Region of Nigeria was formally constituted. The government of this region, which had authority over much of the land area covered by these urban fringe communities, established the Ikeja Industrial Estate and the Ikeja Area Planning Authority in 1960 and 1965, respectively. Although much harm had been done in the area by private developers, the situation was ameliorated by the establishment of the Ikeja estate and of another estate at Ilupeju in Mushin. The creation of Lagos State in 1967 led to the establishment in 1968 of the Lagos State Development and Property Corporation (L.S.D.P.C.), a successor to the Ikeja Area Planning Authority and the Lagos Executive Development Board (L.E.D.B), which had been merged for that purpose. The L.S.D.P.C. has since then been in charge of urban planning in the state, with particular reference to the provision of housing facilities.
14It should be noted that up to the late 1960s Lagos was not the conurbation that it is today. There were gaps in the landscape in between the metropolis and its satellite communities which were filled in one of several ways. First, there was the tendency for inhabitants of the island to migrate to certain areas of the mainland, such as Ajegunle, Mushin and Lawanson. Second, population movements filled the gaps between the city and the suburban settlements, as was the case at Obanikoro, Maryland and Ilupeju. The third tendency was the emergence of entirely new settlements, such as at Amuwo-Odofin. The rise of new industrial and residential areas, as at Oregun, Ojota and Agidingbi, represented another way in which gaps in the urban landscape were filled.
15In the post-World War II years, the metropolis expanded spatially and demographically at an unprecedented rate (See Map 3). Rapid industrial development, the post-war boom and the attendant increase in employment opportunities, and the development of road transport facilities, encouraged this trend. Adalemo has noted that in the period 1950-63, “Lagos burst through the confines of its municipal boundaries and was engulfing neighbouring communities which unlike their counterparts on the islands were not wiped out to give way to new planning schemes.”19 The gap between the metropolitan boundary and the Western Region was filled, on the one hand, by Lagos workers moving into the territory to escape the high rentals and municipal taxes in Lagos and, on the other hand, by the wealthier Lagosians’ engagement in land speculation in the area. The spectacular growth in the population of such fringe communities as Mushin during this period is indicated in table 1.2 below.
MAP3: METROPOLITAN LAGOS, 1950

Source: Adapted from: Akin L. Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria, London, 1968, p. 260 and Margaret Peil Lagos: The City is the People, London 1991, p. 17.
TABLE 1.2: THE POPULATION OF METROPOLITAN LAGOS IN 1952, 1963 AND 1975

Source: Adapted from Adalemo, “The Physical Growth of Metropolitan Lagos,” p. 25, Table 6.
16Today, Lagos constitutes an urban sprawl, a veritable conurbation that straddles some 80 percent of the local governments in the state (see Map 4). In the 1980s and 1990s, the city witnessed spectacular growth in the general northern and eastern direction of the mainland, in the vicinities of Ikotun, Egbe, Isolo, Ojota, Ogudu, Ketu, Ikosi, Iyana-Ipaja, Agege, and Abule-Egba. Similarly, spectacular growth occurred in Okokomaiko and other settlements, in the direction of Badagry. Indeed, the city has spilled over into Ogun State in the Ojodu and Iju areas (see the maps). Many of these satellite communities, which have been swamped by the expanding city, were farm settlements or commercial centres along the Lagos-Abeokuta railway line. As the government acquired land in the Ikeja area for its airport projects, Police College, military barracks and the Ikeja Government Residential Area (G.R.A.), the displaced inhabitants and farmers were compelled to relocate to other emerging suburban communities. In a nutshell, Lagos has grown since the late nineteenth century “by expanding and absorbing existing non-urban settlements located at its growing edges.”20 This process continues to date.
FIG 4: MAP OF METROPOLITAN LAGOS, 2000

17The creation of Lagos State in 1967 was the culmination of local pressure and national politics. The clamour for a Lagos State had been on since the 1950s; but the state did not materialize till the Nigerian national crisis of 1966-67 necessitated states creation as a strategy of survival by the beleaguered Gowon regime. For our purpose, the creation of Lagos State had serious implications for the spread of urban facilities in Lagos, particularly for the urban fringe communities which were until then in the Western Region. As will be shown in the discussion on electricity and water supplies, and road transport, such communities were disadvantaged by their location in a different political entity, regardless of their physical proximity to Lagos. The Federal Government still maintained its presence in Lagos, as was amply demonstrated by the establishment of the Festival Village (Festac Town) ahead of the Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture (FESTAC’77) in Lagos in 1977. It also established other estates at various locations in the metropolis, for example, the Gowon Estate in Ipaja. The Lagos State government has also been active in creating various housing estates within and outside the metropolitan area. Since the era of Governor Lateef Jakande (1979-83), a number of estates have been developed by the state government at Amuwo-Odofin, Iba, Ipaja, Ketu, Ikeja, Isolo and other places. Many of these are popularly called “Jakande estates”. This appellation reflects the association of such efforts - in the provision of government housing - with the then popular “action governor” of Lagos State.
18This chapter has outlined and established a direct correlation between the mutually reinforcing elements of the spatial and demographic expansion of the city of Lagos. This provides a spatial, demographic and conceptual framework for the study of infrastructure development and urban facilities in the Lagos metropolitan area between 1861 and 2000. Each of these facilities is taken up in the following chapters, beginning with electricity.
Notes de bas de page
1 A.S. Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, 5th ed., OUP, 1995.
2 Cf. Andrew G. Onokerhoraye, Social Services in Nigeria: An Introduction, London: Kegan Paul International, 1984; and C. Magbaily Fyle (ed.), The State and the Provision of Social Services in Sierra Leone Since Independence, 1961-91, Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993.
3 Onokerhoraye, Social Services, p.3.
4 Ibid, p.6
5 Ibid. The World Bank noted (in a 1994 report) the general belief that “water should be provided for free.” Noted in George R. G. Clarke, Claude Menard and Anna Maria Zuluaga, “Measuring the Welfare Effects or Reform: Urban Water Supply in Guinea,” World Development, vol. 30, no. 9 (2002), p. 1517.
6 Kunle Bello, “Infrastructure Development For Sustainable National Growth – The Telecommunications Showcase,” Paper presented at the Nigerian Economic Development Forum, Geneva, Switzerland, serialised in The Comet 4 November 2002. p. 24.
7 F.D. Lugard. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 1922, p. 5.
8 Cited in Ayodeji Olukoju, “Transportation in Colonial West Africa,” in GO. Ogunremi and E.K. Faluyi (eds), Economic History of West Africa Since 1750, Ibadan: Rex Charles, 1996, p. 149.
9 Ibid, pp. 144-145 for an analysis of the contending positions on the role of infrastructure in development.
10 Onokerhoraye, Social Services, p. 10.
11 Existing books and essays on this subject (see the bibliography) merely studied some aspects of the subject and, even so, for a fraction of the one and half centuries covered in this work.
12 For general studies of the city, see, for example, A.B. Aderibigbe (ed.), LAGOS: The Development of An African City, Lagos: Longman, 1975; Ade Adefuye, Babatunde Agiri and Jide Osuntokun (eds.), History of the Peoples of Lagos State, Lagos: Literamed, 1987; and Margaret Peil, Lagos: The City is the People, London: Belhaven Press, 1991.
13 I.A. Adalemo, “The Physical Growth of Metropolitan Lagos and Associated Planning Problems,” in D.A. Oyeleye (ed.), Spatial Expansion and Concomitant Problems in the Lagos Metropolitan Area (An Example of a Rapidly Urbanizing Area), Lagos: Department of Geography, University of Lagos, 1981, p. 9.
14 P.O. Sada, “Differential Population Distribution and Growth in Metropolitan Lagos,” Journal of ‘Business and Social Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (1969), pp. 117-132; and National Archives of Nigeria. Ibadan (hereafter, NAT) Comcol 1 739, vol. II, “Census 1931: Lagos Colony Population and Statistics.” It should be noted that colonial census statistics did not reflect the actual population figures owing to evasion and undercounting. But they give a fair idea of the size of the population.
15 P.O. Sada and A.A. Adefolalu, “Urbanization and Problems of Urban Development,” in Aderibigbe (ed.), LAGOS: The Development of an African City, pp. 80-81.
16 M. Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life, London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 19.
17 Ibid., p. 18.
18 P.D. Cole, “Lagos Society in the Nineteenth Century,” in Aderibigbe (ed.), LAGOS: The Development of an African City, pp. 42-43; and NAI, Comcol 1 981 vol.1, “Anti-Mosquito Campaign, Lagos,” enc: Report on the Anti-Mosquito Campaign, Lagos, December 1929, p.2.
19 Adalemo, “The Physical Growth of Metropolitan Lagos,” p. 12.
20 Ibid. p. l
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