Need for a Lekki development master plan
The Lekki corridor, also known as ‘New Lagos’ is, arguably, the fastest growing settlement in Africa. With its fast developing real estate market, huge construction projects and major developments, this corridor is emerging as new main-street of Africa, offering vast investment opportunities. The corridor is attracting huge individual and institutional investments such as the Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ), the ambitious Dangote Refinery expected to come on stream by 2019, the Lekki deep seaport, chemical and fertilizer plants, among others.
About 70 companies cutting across diverse sectors of the economy are said to have signalled interest to do business within the LFTZ with many of them promising billions of dollars of investment in the corridor, which also boasts of West Africa’s biggest shopping mall. Even at that, the Lagos State government says this is just a scratch of the surface as the zone presents limitless opportunities still to be tapped by local and foreign investors.
However, with all these investments and potentials to grow into a city with its own soul, there is no known and concrete plan at public or private sector level to provide the critical infrastructure that will drive and give those investments any meaning.
So far, the only access road to Lekki, for all it represents, is the six-lane Lekki-Epe Expressway that terminates at Abraham Adesanya estate. The entire stretch of the road is congested with cars during rush hour because there are no viable alternatives. And there are increasing fears that things will get worse in that corridor when all the big ticket projects like the Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical complex as well as the Lekki Deep Sea port comes on stream within the next four years.
The implication is that the Lekki corridor is developing to be the heart of business activities in the country’s commercial capital when all these projects are completed. However, governments at the state and federal level are failing to provide the critical infrastructure that is needed to support the huge developments taking place in that corridor. By now the government should have been busy expanding the road from Abraham Adesanya to Epe, constructing alternative roads, and building a rail network and providing other infrastructure and amenities to make life in that corridor match up with the development taking place.
But no, practically nothing is being done and nothing will be done until the situation is out of control before government thinking of a solution or plan. Even the coastal road that was meant to link Victoria Island and Epe, and whose construction should have taken place simultaneously with the Lekki-Epe Expressway construction has remained on the drawing board without any movement.
We see a recreation of another Apapa, Nigeria’s congested and gridlocked premier port city. But Lekki’s case will be worse than Apapa’s because there are multiple access roads to and from Apapa, but there is only one road to and from Lekki.
Besides critical infrastructure, there is also the fear that there is no planned development in the corridor even as more people move into the area. Analysts believe the government would be contending with the development of urban slums if it does not take an interest in how the area develops.
The long term impact may be a significant drop in property value that will leave land speculators counting their losses. Property value in Apapa has dropped by almost 50 percent as residents are fleeing and businesses are relocating. No new investment is coming into the port city at the moment.
We call on the Lagos state government to wake up to the demands of administering a cosmopolitan city as Lagos. It should, as a matter of urgency, create a master plan for the development of the corridor and show commitment, beyond mere words, to building new road and train networks that would ease the congestion on that axis and bring the infrastructure in line with major cities in the world.