“When the Chinese ambassador was asked his opinion on this city, he replied laconically, ‘too dirty’.… The summer months, on the other hand, created their own obnoxious cocktail, ‘that combined odour of stale fruit and vegetables, rotten eggs, foul tobacco, spilt beer, rank cart grease, dried soot, smoke, triturated road dust and damp straw’…. Dirt posed a challenge in terms of the sheer volume of unwanted matter: others contained a real or perceived danger to public health.… Most (working class) struggled to wash themselves and their clothes. First and foremost finding water was a challenge. Many tenements lacked even a single tap…or communal standpipes which were turned on for only a few hours per week…. Women were obliged to queue to fill buckets with rather murky liquid – quarrelling for their turn, the strongest pushing forward – which they would carry back home to serve as their pathetic ration for washing, cooking and laundry.”
A quick glance at this quote and you would imagine I was talking about Lagos. Maybe not the inhabitants of the islands but those in Orile, Mushin, Badia and Ajegunle would certainly recognise it. However, this is not Lagos but the London of the early nineteenth century according to a recent book (Dirty Old London, The Fight Against Victorian Filth. Lee Jackson, Yale University Press, 2014).
Does it seem strange that I refer back to the history of London to provide some hope and balance when thinking about the future of Lagos? I can only imagine how many nights our governors must have sat on their beds and wondered how it would ever be possible to address the scale of Lagos’ deficiencies? Not just in water or sewage but in all infrastructure. However, I am sure that the authorities in London in the early 19th century must have felt the same way. In 1853, the year of the worst epidemic, some 10,000 Londoners died of cholera. Infant mortality and life expectancy were actually inferior for the early British working class then than for Nigerians today.
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Provision of clean water is generally considered a basic human right. It is fundamental to health and lack of it adversely affects the vulnerable in our society more than others. Water-borne disease (malaria, cholera, typhus, diarrhoea and so on) is the single biggest contributor to death globally. Without access to clean drinking water, the maintenance of a healthy population is not possible. It is not possible to provide guaranteed clean water without tackling sewage, drainage, pollution of all kinds, flood control and other contributory problems. Without these things the Lagos mega-city vision as shared by most residents and both gubernatorial candidates (even though they may disagree on methodology and personality, the vision is broadly the same) will not happen. The scale of the task is enormous for Lagos, just as it was for London two hundred years ago.
Lagos State Water Corporation is the largest utility company in Africa. It currently has a capacity of 210 million gallons a day (assuming an unlikely 100 percent power availability) to meet a demand of 540 million gallons today and an estimated 733 million by 2020. According to its managing director, Shayo Holloway, it needs investment of US$3.5 billion to reach that figure. He says, “The state government cannot singlehandedly execute the Water Master Plan (as) the state would need to divert every naira that comes into her coffers to the water sector for the next 2.5 years.” Their plan to tackle this includes the now ubiquitous Public Private Partnership (PPP) policy. According to Holloway, not selling off assets but to ultimately acquire functioning, ‘fit for purpose’, assets through the “Build Operate Transfer” concessioning model that has proved so unpopular on such projects as Lekki Expressway and bridge.
This model is actually remarkably similar to that which transformed London in the 19th century. The terminology would be different but it was pioneers from the private sector that made the difference then. Reformers such as Edwin Chadwick and engineers like Joseph Bazalgette drove the vision. However, as in Lagos, this was not possible overnight. In fact, it took broadly from around 1830 as London’s population really started exploding, through the years of ‘the big stink’ and epidemics to around 1880 when London would have started being recognisable, in terms of public utilities, as the city of today. (Continues next week)
Keith Richards
