Seen from Europe, Onitsha will perhaps evoke the title of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Who knows, on the other hand, that the city thus named, located on the left bank of the Niger River, in the south of Nigeria, today forms, with the localities which surround it, the third largest city on the African continent? With a population estimated at more than 8.5 million people, it arrives behind the urban centers of Cairo and Lagos, in Nigeria. At the beginning of the 21ste century, the city – which itself has around 1.5 million inhabitants – did not even appear in the top 50 of the largest urban areas in Africa.
In the meantime, Onitsha has suddenly swelled, accumulating more or less flattering epithets in the process: one of the most dynamic cities in the world in terms of job creation, according to the World Bank; one of the most polluted, according to a ranking by the World Health Organization published in 2016. It illustrates two underlying trends in African urbanization. Its frantic pace and unique dynamics. The city has grown through sprawl, bringing together other towns, often former rural areas which have gradually become denser under the effect of population growth. Its surface area is today 80 times larger than the official administrative limits of the city.
“It all happened spontaneously, without any planning”, describes Patrick Lamson-Hall, economist at Africapolis. It is the research work of this study center on African cities, hosted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has made it possible to identify the real dimensions of the Nigerian urban area. “It was a real surprise. says Mr. Lamson-Hall. However, Onitsha is not an isolated case: there are many other examples on the continent of vast urban areas which are being formed without being organized and therefore without benefiting from infrastructure development strategies and public services. »
The result ? Cities that are under-equipped in terms of access to water, electricity, sanitation or public transport, and where informality remains the rule in terms of employment and housing. Many neighborhoods remain at the stage of huge shanty towns, where more than half of African city dwellers are today concentrated. To the point that this rampant urbanization is not accompanied by the benefits traditionally associated with it: the transition from rural and low-productivity societies to an economy of industry and services with higher added value.
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