The Curse of the Nation-State

 The population of Lagos, Nigeria a decade ago, was at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The population was already 40 times bigger than it had been in 1960, when Nigeria gained independence. One local demographer estimated that 5,000 people were migrating to Lagos every day, mostly from the Nigerian countryside. Since then, the city has continued to swell. By 2035, the UN projects that Lagos will be home to 24.5 million people.

Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people. By the middle of the century, experts such as Edward Paice, author of Youthquake: Why Africa’s Demography Should Matter to the World, believe that this number will have almost doubled. 

By the end of this century, the UN projects that Africa, which had less than one-tenth of the world’s population in 1950, will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity. By 2050, about 40% of all the people under 18 in the world will be African.

A stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos has become to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis”. In just over a decade from now, its major cities will contain 40 million people. Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, will be almost as large as New York City is today.  The projected population for this coastal zone will reach 51 million people by 2035.  By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.

"...Africa is unquestionably the continent that will drive the future of urbanisation. And it is that strip along the coast of west Africa where the biggest changes are coming,” said Daniel Hoornweg, a scholar of urbanisation at Ontario Tech University. “If it can develop efficiently, the region will become more than the sum of its parts – and the parts themselves are quite big. But if it develops badly, a tremendous amount of economic potential will be lost, and in the worst of cases, all hell could break loose.”

Coastal west Africa’s urbanisation gathers pace, and populations and regional commerce begin to surge across old imperial borders, the lives of tens of millions of people along the coastal corridor are changing in ways that neither colonial designs nor six decades of independent government seem to have remotely anticipated. In May, the African Development Bank announced it had raised $15.6bn to fund the construction of a new coastal highway from Lagos to Abidjan, the West African Highway.

The needs of west Africa’s booming population collide with the stubborn realities of the nation-state, and specifically with contrasting colonial histories.  

E Gyimah-Boadi, the co-founder and former CEO of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a thinktank, explained,  “ The nation-state has been a huge curse. It worked very well for some of us, but we have left very little behind for the young. Basically, we have cheated them.”

Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century | Africa | The Guardian