When cities, urbanisation become economic liabilities

Growth of cities elsewhere, particularly in advanced economies of the world, signposts economic growth and wellbeing, improved living standards for the people, and increased prospects for job and wealth creation. This is not so for Africa.

In Africa, the growth of cities and rising urbanisation are such that it is feared that in about 15 years, unless something happens to check it, city population will double its current figure of about 65 percent of the continent’s total population.

By the last count, seven new cities which are still under construction are anticipated across Africa and these have a combined capacity to provide homes for about 800,000 residents.

These cities include Eko Atlantic City in Lagos, Nigeria, which sits on nine million square metres of land with a promise of providing home for 250,000 residents and 150,000 others commuting to it every day. Others are Kiamba in Angola; Konzo Techno City in Kenya; Apolonia and King City in Greater Accra and Western Ghana; Tatu City in Nairobi, capital of Kenya; La Cite du Fleuve in Kinshasa, the capital of the Republic of Congo; and Hope City also in Accra, Ghana.

UN-HABITAT, the human settlement agency of the United Nations, notes that Africa is experiencing a fast-paced urbanisation with more people, especially the youth, coming to the city.

The agency, however, worries that this rapid urbanization, which is supposed to be an economic asset, is rather a seeming liability because it is happening in largely unplanned cities, estimating that about 60 percent of the urban city dwellers in Africa live in slums.

Lagos, Nigeria’s largest commercial city, has nine identified slum areas including Badia, Amukoko, Ajegunle, Okokomaiko, Orile, among others, and over 70 percent of the city’s 18 million people live in these slum areas. Abuja, the federal capital city, also has a number of growing slum areas like Kuje, Kubwa, Nyanya and others.

In Ghana, Sodom and Gomorrah represents the face of poverty and deprivation in Accra, the country’s capital. The situation is perhaps worse in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, which is a typical example of a settlement for the urban poor. These areas, though within the urban areas, suffer from lack of facilities, unplanned and unsustainable development.

It is against this backdrop that UN-HABITAT is canvassing planned cities in Africa for wealth creation and poverty alleviation. According to the agency, urbanisation in Africa happens mainly in an unplanned manner, lacking in facilities, access to health, education, sanitation, and proper construction of cities.

“We have realised that African cities developments are liabilities and not assets because they are plagued by problems very difficult to manage; but as opposed to what we think, the city is an asset, not a liability,” says Joan Clos, the agency’s director for Human Settlement, explaining that the city is a place that can generate economic awareness.

Clos advises that the city as a wealth generating place has to be planned and organised in such a way that it should produce wealth to improve human settlement, pointing out, however, that the city could be a source of conflict, problem and congestion.

Experts in city development insist that urbanisation process is a source of wealth which is not immediately understood, pointing out that once a country urbanises a city, it creates value.

In their opinion, the wealth of a city can only be realised if the city is well managed, adding that information interchange is cheaper in a city than in an isolated place in a rural area.

According to the experts, closeness of factors of production creates economic efficiency; it diminishes transaction cost and increases the value of urbanisation and also the value of agglomeration and economy of scale.

By: Chuka Uroko