My Beauty Best Teacher

In Postconsumption Niti Bhan commends the "business flair of Nigeria's slum dwellers"highlighted in 'Welcome to Lagos':

In three programmes, series producer Will Anderson assembles a number of hugely likeable, articulate and witty people who live on garbage heaps, in beachside shanty towns and slums on stilts in the city's lagoon. Their tales build an intimate portrait of a city brimming with entrepreneurial flair, resilience, tough-mindedness and hope. This is not the apocalyptic urban vision with which Lagos has become synonymous and about which development experts sweat as the population of 16m climbs steadily towards a forecast 25m.Instead, it is a hymn to humanity and to the capacity of Africans to find means and motive to survive in even the most adverse conditions.

Image via Wikipedia

The rate at which Nigeria's population has increased, and continues to increase, is staggering. In 1950, 10 years before it gained independence from Britain, 34 million people lived here. The UN believes there are now almost 150 million Nigerians; it has become the world's eighth most populous country, bigger than Russia or Japan. Between now and the middle of the century, only India will add more people to the world's population. If you want to see what it means to live in the middle of a population explosion - the kind of generational leap in size that happened in London in the 19th century and New York in the 20th - Lagos is the ideal place. Where, I wondered, do all the extra people go?...[continue reading]

...my first impression of the verdant city was of explosive energy tempered by impressive urban development...The government fails to provide essential services, from infrastructure to education, so the market fills the gap. Lagos is a highly-functioning libertarian dystopia where you can get anything if you have the naira, and the tens of thousands streaming from the country can eke out a living alongside prospecting multinational yuppies. The Wild West model will never yield sustainable social or economic development, but in Lagos it’s the only game in town.

Will Connor at the NYTimes reports:

Just another Saturday night in Lagos, one of Africa’s money- and contrast-rich boomtowns. Already a city of superlatives on the continent (it has variously been deemed Africa’s most traffic-plagued, most populous and fastest-growing megacity), Lagos has a new title to add to its mantel: most expensive.
Lagos has always been one of the most powerful commercial hubs in West Africa, ever since slaves were first shipped from here to Europe and the Americas. But because of the rising price of oil, the declining United States dollar, the relocation of foreign workers from the oil-rich but kidnapping-prone Niger Delta, large privatization efforts and a mad dash for the city’s remaining plots of land, Lagos is more flush with cash and full of glitter than ever...[continue reading]

Boing Boing reports on Frank Gossner's compilation:

Lagos Disco Inferno, 12 rare and wild examples of the sound of Lagos in the late 1970s. As Dean Disi (formerly director of Lagos label TYC Records) writes in the liner notes for the album:

Lagos by the 1970s was a huge metropolitan city. Due to the oil boom, there was money to be made with music and nightlife and big international record labels like EMI, Decca and Philips had set up their recording studios that for a big part got equipped with vintage hardware handed down from their European franchises...

...a uniquely vibrant, gritty, energetic and sometimes quite dangerous tropical metropolis has always been much more than just a city. A state of mind where third world poverty met the oil boom, where African traditions clashed with Western decadence. Make no mistake, this stuff will have you dance in a feverish rush in no time.

From the Lagos SoundScape website:

For fifteen minutes I sit and I listen to the composed chaos, the Lagos Soundscape— ‘This is Lagos’. I have heard this familiar cacophony before; from my vantage view on the roof top of my family home in Lagos - on roof tops mainly-, at Kalakuta Republic, but also on the rare occasion when I am in no hurry to go anywhere and just drifting through this urban squalor...[continue reading]

The 4th Lagos Economic Summit:

Will present a forum for government to identify and engage with prospective solution providers and investors who can assist the government in its goals to make Lagos Africa's model city.”With two years to the 20 million-population mark as projected by the UN-Habitat the state must begin to consider the various strategies that others have successfully adopted make Lagos a world-class livable state. The new challenge before the state is to continue to act positively and attract investors and solution providers.

In 3QuarksDaily Tolu Ogunlesi on a re-energized literary scene in Nigeria:

Image via Wikipedia

Lagos is suddenly a hot new destination for writers from all over the world – courtesy of the exploits and efforts of writers like Adichie. Her four-year-old annual Creative Writing workshop, sponsored by Nigeria’s oldest and biggest beer company (which before now appeared to be more at home with sponsoring music festivals and talent hunts) has brought Jason Cowley, Nathan Englander, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jackie Kay, Doreen Baingana and Dave Eggers to Lagos, to facilitate writing sessions. This year Ama Ata Aidoo, Niq Mhlongo...

Robert Neuwirth writes(pdf) about the critical role of the informal economy in Lagos, Nigeria:

The informal sector is the most dynamic and fastest-growing part of the city.Eighty per cent of the people who live in Lagos work in the informal economy,which accounts for more than two-thirds of Nigeria’s gross domestic product. This gives informal workers unusual economic power: about US$125 billion worth. The unemployment and the massive social upheaval and misery that would exist if the thousands of people who immigrate to Lagos every day weren’t able to find work could quickly lead to social and political anarchy. The informal sector is what holds the country together and what determines its shape.

An excerpt from Robert Neuwirth's Lecture 'The Extroverted City of System D' a contribution to the book Open City:

In Lagos, everything is informal. The bus system is informal—the government got out of mass transit business decades ago (though it has recently stepped back into public transport with a bus rapid transit line) and the system that includes more than 75,000 danfos was held together informally by the National Union of Road Transport Workers as one-part mass transit and one-part Ponzi scheme. One of the largest formal supermarkets in Lagos buys most of its product from informal wholesalers. Some major multinationals here distribute their products through informal networks. And informal merchants invest in the formal world.

Authorities in the city acknowledge that as much as 80 percent of the work force—and Lagos has between nine and 17 million inhabitants, depending on where you draw the boundaries and who’s doing the counting—is involved in the informal sector. The federal government also suggests that somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economic activity derives in some way from the informal sector—and this means that, in aggregate, merchants like Prince Chidi Onyeyirim and Fatai Agbalaya are more important to Nigeria’s future than Shell, Mobil, and Chevron, the multinational oil giants that pump sweet crude from the Niger River Delta.

ABN Digital presents Eye on Lagos:

The business temperature here in Lagos is at boiling point, but like every major business destination there are challenges. Lets find out how businessmen and women in Lagos are adapting.

ABN Digital presents Eye on Lagos:

The business temperature here in Lagos is at boiling point, but like every major business destination there are challenges. Lets find out how businessmen and women in Lagos are adapting.

ABN Digital reports on the Lagos Rental Sector,which represents an opportunity for the mortgage market:

The lack of proper and affordable housing in Lagos has been a thorn in the flesh of Lagos residents for many years now. But the situation may soon change for the better.

Kelechi Amadi-Obi, Uchechukwa James-Iroha, Toyosi Odunsi, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke & Toyin Sokefun the photographers behind the :

Artists' collective, Depth of Field (DOF), live and work in Lagos, Nigeria. They have developed a remarkable track record of collaborative practice. The six artists who make up DOF assign themselves a weekly theme and meet a week later to hold a critical session on the resulting images. Their work largely centres on the vibrant street life of Lagos-SLG

"...James Tooley argues that private education is cheaper and more effective than public education.For instance, in Lagos State, the mean maths score advantage over government schools was about 15 and 19 percentage points more respectively in private registered and unregistered schools, while in English it was 23 and 30 percentage points more.More striking: enrollment at private schools in Africa is hugely under-reported, and efforts to provide free primary education may have encouraged parents to move children from the private to the public sector, saving money but making no impact on educational standards.

In Ga District, Ghana, 64 percent of school children attend private unaided schools and in Lagos State we estimate that 75 percent of school children are in private schools - with a larger proportion in unregistered private schools (33 percent of the total) than in government schools (25 percent)..."