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Just a few weeks in the past, a bunch of my Lagos-based mates tried to rearrange a day trip on the seashore. It ought to’ve been a reasonably simple concept that required little to no planning. In spite of everything, we’re surrounded by water. The mix 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 seashore of alternative required renting a ship for a roughly 30-minute journey every manner and paying an entry price upon arrival.
This inconvenience is repeated at many different seashores throughout the town: they’re each onerous to get to and require a price to entry.
Throughout Lagos, the state has washed its palms of managing seashores, leaving non-public buyers 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 seashore has turn into yet one more 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 usually on the street within the area. Each different nation with an Atlantic Ocean shoreline, from Ghana to Sierra Leone through Togo and Senegal, affords free entry to public seashores. No reporting journey is full with out a night go to to the shoreline.
Issues weren’t at all times this manner in Nigeria.
The notorious Bar Seashore — as soon as the positioning of public executions by firing squad in the course of the nation’s squalid Nineteen Seventies navy period — was a Lagos hotspot till the 2010s. The seashore was identical to the town: chaotic, not effectively suited to the faint of coronary heart and at all times enjoyable. Prayers and loud music boomed, generally on the similar time. For a price, guests might trip on a horse and have their photos taken — there’s a grinning picture of a youthful me on horseback on the seashore.
However Bar Seashore has now utterly disappeared after years of floods. It has made manner for the formidable Eko Atlantic challenge, constructed on land reclaimed from the ocean and deliberate as a glitzy enterprise district.
This can be a severe 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 will’ve been a possibility to hunt reduction by the ocean for the town’s put-upon residents — however they’re struggling to search out wherever they will go.
Lagos’s lack of free seashores illustrates the way in which during 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 seashore.
Throughout Nigeria, supposedly public areas and providers have gotten more and more privatised.
Privatisation is seen as a technique to revive the financial system. However ever extra public providers — resembling faculties and hospitals — have turn into uncared for, and high-quality, low-cost options haven’t at all times taken their place. Folks make do with the non-public variations they will afford.
It appears unsustainable to me {that a} metropolis that runs on the onerous 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 usually argue that privatisation has made seashores cleaner and safer than once they had been government-run.
That is undoubtedly true. But it surely 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 is rarely shy about trumpeting its file “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 not assure free entry to the seashore, when its a lot poorer counterparts throughout west Africa accomplish that with relative ease, then who precisely is Lagos for?
