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Just a few weeks in the past, a bunch of my Lagos-based associates tried to rearrange a day trip on the seaside. It ought to’ve been a reasonably simple concept that required little to no planning. In any case, we’re surrounded by water. The mixture of the Atlantic Ocean and Lagos Lagoon gives the town with an ample shoreline and white sandy seashores.
However as anybody who has ever visited Nigeria is aware of, hardly anything comes simple right here. Reaching our seaside of selection required renting a ship for a roughly 30-minute journey every means and paying an entry price upon arrival.
This inconvenience is repeated at many different seashores throughout the town: they’re each laborious to get to and require a price to entry.
Throughout Lagos, the state has washed its fingers of managing seashores, leaving personal traders to develop resorts with beachfront entry that exclude all however the pretty well-off. In a rustic with sky-high inflation and acute poverty, the seaside has turn into another type of entertainment that’s prohibitively costly for a lot of of its largest metropolis’s estimated 21mn residents.
Nigeria is an anomaly in that regard. Because the Monetary Instances’ man in west Africa, I’m typically on the highway within the area. Each different nation with an Atlantic Ocean shoreline, from Ghana to Sierra Leone through Togo and Senegal, gives free entry to public seashores. No reporting journey is full with out a night go to to the shoreline.
Issues weren’t all the time this manner in Nigeria.
The notorious Bar Seashore — as soon as the positioning of public executions by firing squad throughout the nation’s squalid Seventies army period — was a Lagos hotspot till the 2010s. The seaside was similar to the town: chaotic, not properly suited to the faint of coronary heart and all the time enjoyable. Prayers and loud music boomed, generally on the similar time. For a price, guests might journey on a horse and have their footage taken — there’s a grinning picture of a youthful me on horseback on the seaside.
However Bar Seashore has now fully disappeared after years of floods. It has made means for the formidable Eko Atlantic mission, constructed on land reclaimed from the ocean and deliberate as a glitzy enterprise district.
This can be a critical loss.
Lagos could be very sizzling and humid, significantly within the dry season. A west African heatwave final yr noticed temperatures soar above 40C (and is presumably an indication of issues to come back). Excessive humidity made the times really feel even hotter. It could’ve been a possibility to hunt reduction by the ocean for the town’s put-upon residents — however they’re struggling to seek out wherever they’ll go.
Lagos’s lack of free seashores illustrates the way in which through which the town continues to squeeze its poorer residents. It issues in some ways past sea and sand that solely individuals of a sure social standing can afford one thing so simple as a visit to the seaside.
Throughout Nigeria, supposedly public areas and companies have gotten more and more privatised.
Privatisation is seen as a approach to revive the financial system. However ever extra public companies — resembling faculties and hospitals — have turn into uncared for and high-quality, low-cost options haven’t all the time taken their place. Folks make do with the personal variations they’ll afford.
It appears unsustainable to me {that a} metropolis that runs on the laborious work of its poorest individuals can proceed to deprive residents of even essentially the most primary of pleasures as a result of it deems recreation unimportant. But it’s extremely unlikely that seashores will ever be free to entry in Lagos once more.
Authorities officers typically argue that privatisation has made seashores cleaner and safer than after they had been government-run.
That is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless it additionally quantities to an admission of failure and a dereliction of obligation for a metropolis authorities that leads the nation in tax income assortment and isn’t shy about trumpeting its document “internally generated income”.
If a metropolis that collected greater than $800mn in tax revenues final yr — 45 per cent up from the earlier yr — can’t assure free entry to the seaside, when its a lot poorer counterparts throughout west Africa achieve this with relative ease, then who precisely is Lagos for?
