Lagos is a city that confounds, exhilarates, thwarts, titillates and frustrates. Now if I said the ‘biography’ of Lagos is overdue, it would perhaps be legitimate if I was challenged to write it myself. But fundamentally, I am not a Lagosian, not in the way my wife is a Lagosian. She was born there, spent years there before she came to live in the UK. She can easily trace her roots for eons to somewhere in the eddying hub of the city, just at the edge of Campos Square. And I am not such a Lagosian who finds himself living in the city for umpteen years, whether he was born there or not.

But all this does not matter. With a bit - or exhaustive - research, writing the biography might be a possibility. And with a bit of love for the city too. Believe me, it is possible to fall in love with a city. Lagos has its lovers, its diehard, eyes-wide-open sort of lovers. There are those who would not swap the cramped, musty fughole in which they are ensconced in Lagos for a mansion ‘upcountry,’ the grimy Lagos bedsitter in which there may reside all the world and his wife.

I still ever so slightly raise an eyebrow when those who consider themselves true-born Lagosians describe someone who originated from a state like Ondo – myself, for instance – as upcountry folk, Ara Oke. Of course Ondo and Oyo are truly to the north of Lagos, but there is more to the phrase Ara Oke than merely those who come from up there. In the best of literal worlds, Ara Oke should be ‘superior’ to Ara Isale, that is nether-people. For instance in British idiotism, to ‘send somebody down’ from University is either to rusticate or expel him outright, the university signifying a higher place – an up-place.

But in Lagos the import of up-place - the upcountry - leans towards a rustic, benighted place somewhere in depths of Ondo or Oyo or Kwara state, although I must admit that the epithet is often used light-heartedly. I lived in Lagos off and on for many years, but I never envied those who loved the city. Lagos might be an intriguing city, but since the ‘oil boom’ barged upon the country the city has not been a genial and peaceable place to live. Traffic jams - which everyone calls ‘hold-ups’ in Lagos. Robberies. Bad Roads. Rackety noise. Obnoxious and noxious Smell. Mountains of garbage. Exhaust fumes. And a good number of ‘Lagosians’ are jolly ignoramuses and rubes that you wonder how anyone could imagine Lagos does confer any sort of native acumen in the first place. I visited Fela’s Shrine and Lagbaja’s Motherlan’ a number of times, and glimpsed other quotidian apertures of brightnesses in the city, Lagos remained for me a challenging place – worthy, in spite of the odds, of being mined for stories, for anecdotes, and of being made a biographical subject in itself.

I have read a couple of books about London. I commend to anyone who has or has not been to London to read Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Biography’ of London – the clear-eyed percipience with which Ackroyd sees the Thames-driven city, the ease of his style, the limber detailing, would hold the reader’s hand in a dulcet documentarist’s travel through the city. Although Lagos might not be a ‘world city’ like London or New York, I think it is a city worth depicting in the light it sheds, a light at once garish and glum, sometimes dappled with grey shades.  

One of world’s most outstanding and outré architects, Rem Koolhas, took an interest in Lagos, as in many cities, and this has yielded a documentary that I bought on Amazon.com and saw several months ago. Lagos Wide & Close Interactive Journey Through the City is as engaging as a super-architect could possibly make a documentary about a city so unplanned and so rough-and-unready as Lagos. In the film Koolhas is rather too cool about the passion-wrought Lagos. He shows the uglier side of the city - as well as the sumptuously architectural ghettoes of Lekki and other beauty spots on Lagos Island - but he latches less on the Sturm und Drang the city throws up in its every facet, far less than a literary artist or even a historian would have would have done. Much as I await the release of Harvard-sponsored Lagos: How it Works, a book that would feature contributions by Koolhas and others, I am not sure it is going to be biographical fantasia that I wish for, the sort of book that would capture the city’s restiveness, its various brusqueries. If a few architecture slang could find its way into Lagos Wide and Close, then How The City Works might find itself struggling to be purged of scholastic textbookishness. Although Koolhas’s motives might be professional - his quest for future megacities -the interest he takes in the city is welcome.  

My last visit to Lagos was rather anticipatory. The state Governor, Mr Fashola, is being cried up home and abroad for being the first authentic ‘action governor’ the state, no, the country, has ever had. But then I do remember that Lagos has often been associated with performing ‘action governors’ than other states in Nigeria. Lateef Jakande was reputed to be the best governor among the 19 during Shagari’s misrule. Truly, I think the man deserved some credit. And there was Mohammed Marwa who was simply a uniformed brigand but whom the wise people of Lagos hero-worshipped in his time and who is now the Nigerian ambassador to South Africa, still carrying the tag ‘His Excellency.’ I remember how I used to argue against arguments for Marwa’s excellence and honesty. You would hear the hackneyed submission: At least he is better than those who came before him. In spite of our desultory collective memory, today some of us do know that Marwa was worse than most of  those who came before and after him – at least as far as gubernatorial stealing is concerned.

If we had ways of measuring performance ratings, Fashola would have surpassed even himself. In the scorecard of millions of Lagosians the name Fashola equals premium, equals distinction. He is praised by nearly everyone. He transcends all rules of political valuation in Nigeria. His putative performance borders on the bionic. He is seen as a man travelling on a road not often taken by Nigerian office-holders – and this has been set down to the fact that he was not a career politician in the first place. Spammy pictures of cleaner, boulevardlike Lagos streets had invaded the mailboxes of many people a couple of months ago. Even before these pictures found their ways into the mailboxes, herd-instinct had kicked in and those who had not even been to Lagos since Fashola got there had also sung hosanna to him – and they still do.

Prepossessed by, but not entirely taken with, this mass euphoria, I journeyed into Lagos several weeks ago, accompanied by my family. My six-year old daughter who had never been to Nigeria involuntarily cocked a snook at the city, inversely, by holding her nose when she got out from the MMA arrival lounge. I didn’t like this. I couldn’t smell anything except the hum of exhaust fumes. I was relieved when the girl said she had held her nose not because of waves of effluvium or halitosis or b.o but simply because of the heady tang of exhaust fumes. I shrugged this off, knowing she would get used to the smell within hours (and truly, the next day she was at her playful best).

For my part, I would have to take the smell of exhaust smoke in Lagos as a matter of course, and it is certainly not Fashola’s fault that most of the vehicles in the city are not ‘green.’ Nationally we are not simply ready for the postmodern ‘green revolution.’ Calibrating the level of carbon emission from vehicles is not a luxury the good country called Nigeria is ready to divert itself with now. And no one could really blame Fashola for the cratery potholes scarring the majority of Lagos roads. One’s feelings that the pictures of paradisiac Lagos swapped around the net was a proxy advertisement for Governor Fashola was borne out with miles and miles of horrendous roads that still typify Greater Lagos. Of course one sees the sign that the governor is doing something: The purging of Oshodi (though despite the colonic irrigation, this late-lamented rectum of Lagos metropolitan still reveals bits of sociological shit, and I think this may remain for a long time). And there are these ranks of red coaches. Then the monstrous mustard contraptions called Molue were also thin on the ground.

Fashola is positioning himself well for a good performance in Lagos. He appears like a man who would apply more than mere top-dressing to Lagos problems. But I would not begin to give Governor Fashola any mark at all. I would have to wait until perhaps the final year of his tenure as governor before I would size his performance up. While I would not expect Lagos to have become another Singapore even if Fashola spent eight years I think one should be able to see more than one is seeing now. And we must not forget that Fashola is not a mayor of Lagos but the governor of Lagos State and prettifying some places on Lagos island is certainly not going to be a worthy legacy. What he has started in the heart of Lagos should be reduplicated all over the state.

Beyond pockets of changes, in the way of the large picture the Lagos I saw in the two weeks I spent was frankly slightly different from the Lagos I had known for decades. For instance, it took me five hour to journey from Ogba in Ikeja to Aja just after Lekki. The return journey was even draggier. Still clearly marked on people’s faces was the Felasophical Suffering and not-quite-Smiling. There is the Anger and the Shouting, the Curses, the Shakespearean Alarums and Excursions. Lagos is still the good old Lagos. I don’t want to second-guess Governor Fashola and pronounce on what he may achieve in years to come, but for now I think he is being terrifically buttered up. I believe people should just allow him to do what he wants to do instead of overwhelming him with hasty, exceedingly parroted panegyrics. What I have come to realise is that we are a society that is quick to confer palm, sometimes too hastily. But this is somewhat understandable, we have long been burdened by do-nothing rulers and rulerettes that we are only too willing to pick at crumbs, scrape the half-burnt bits at the bottom of a pot, bigging up modicum gestures.

When we look for every opportunity to praise - rather than calmly appraise - those we vote for (or do not vote for) to occupy a position and who draw millions of naira as annuities for jobs they are supposed to do and are often not doing, or only doing sketchily, then we will always end up being conned and deceived. Marwa hid behind the rosebush of undeserved praise to steal billions of naira from Lagos state treasury. As it is, there is enough ground to give Fashola the greater benefit of the doubt. He is truly gearing himself up for greater work in Lagos. But ultimately if I had to opine on Governor Fashola, I would concentrate on the human angle, on what the governor had done to affect the misery index of a city where people have been chronically immiserated by years of governmental irresponsibility and insensitivity. Which was why I am more concerned with what happened to those that were removed from Oshodi and not with how Oshodi looks now.

Beyond the distraction of seeing Lagos through the eye of Fashola, I had tried to give the city the usual pedestrian tourist-ish skimming I do give a place I may have lived before but has not been to for some time. Being an unsleeping student of semiotics - signs - there is a lot to glimpse in Lagos, just as in any big city. I had wondered why what may turn out to be the largest shopping complex in the city has to carry the tag ‘Army,’ I mean the arch-gated new mall you see just as you leave Oshodi going towards Ikeja. Why not The People’s Shopping Complex? And half a mile on I saw Plato Hospital which would have been merely quaint if I did not peruse Pythagoras College somewhere in Ikeja the next day. I wondered whether Lagos was now becoming philosophical, classical. Socrates University? Well that would be fine, it would at least constitute a challenge to the many philosophobic Christian universities in the city. And the brash contrasts of Lagos still predominate: the stinking rich vis-à-vis the dirt poor. I visited a relative somewhere in submainland Lagos who lives in a room with four children and a husband who has pretty nearly given up, the tenement neighbours on a sprawling shack-built slum where people live amphibian lives over the lagoon. A couple of hours later I was in the pelf-pots of Victoria Garden City to visit another relative. As Koolhas easily forecasted, Lagos has recently been crayoned - not in the brightest of colours - as a megacity and certainly a megacity of both slumdogs and millionaires, of shanty-rats and billionaires. 

Robot  # 1 | 17.08.2009 00:50

When we look for every opportunity to praise - rather than calmly appraise - those we vote for (or do not vote for) to occupy a position and who draw millions of naira as annuities for jobs they are supposed to do and are often not doing, or only doing sketchily, then we will always end up being conned and deceived. Marwa hid behind the rosebush of undeserved praise to steal billions of naira from Lagos state treasury. As it is, there is enough ground to give Fashola the greater benefit of the doubt. ...Read the full article.

Austin  # 2 | 17.08.2009 02:59

Simply beautiful. Thanks.

BiafranPrincess  # 3 | 17.08.2009 09:18

Thanks for this gem of an article. Thanks again for bing us to our senses. We have been so starved of the waters of good governance that even a of a pond will make us sing Halleluah....I hope Fashola continues to work, so that the true promise of Lagos will be realised. On a Nigerian rating axis , we've been quick to put him on the positive slope but we forget that we've been in the negative end for so long, that all he's done is striving to even bring us to the point 'zero'. So that we can attempt to beging our journey to the positive and be even worthy of comparism to inernational cities.....at Fashola's pace, it'll probably take 50 years. That's good news, considering that 200 years may be too soon for the rest of the country to catch up......

Magic  # 4 | 17.08.2009 17:06

Ade, Dont worry about your wife's jokes on Ara Oke, you can call her Ara Isale. Your point about Oshodi creat mix feelings because Fashola should be judged on what he did for people. I agree. The problem with Lagos is the amount of people entering the City on a daily basis. Some motorpark boys make money taking them to where to settle and sell. Some of them should be in school but they came to trade, some of them should be with their parents but the parents sent them to trade. Even husband and wives trade. If husband, wives and children sell, who is buying? The amount of money they make from selling can not pay rent for the people's plaza you envisioned. So you find them floating all over the streets. The point has been made that it is the only way they feed their families, that Fashola is more concerned about the rich with cars. No matter what, there has to be crowd control becuse of accidents, truants and vagabonds. Even beggers make money everywhere and more in Lagos. At some point, they just have to be moved. All the markets built are subcontracted to others until the rent was out of reach. It is a difficult problem for anyone to solve. But it is true, we over praise our leaders. What Fashola has shown is that a little thing here and there can make a difference. Nobody should compare him to Jakande though.

agbajo owo  # 5 | 18.08.2009 05:16

I think we need a bit of both. We need to acknowledge good work even if it is yet unfinished. Likewise we need people like you who will awaken them to the reality of the fact that the fact that there is still a lot to be done. A kind of "congratulation but not yet". I live in Lagos before and during Marwa's era and I know for sure he made a difference. You may say comparatively - Raji Rasaki, Mike Akhigbe and the likes drove Lagos completely to the ground. I can remember that he did a lot on security. Baba Jakande achieved a lot. Although the elite in Lagos did not appreciate him after all their children could never have been on the second shift on the school rota. If we had the consistency of this little achievement there will not be so much despair in thee nation.