With rural populations streaming into old and new cities looking for
jobs and better livelihoods, Africa's greatest challenge in the 21st
century is to manage its rapid urbanisation. Read an extract from our dossier on urbanisation and infrastructure, published ahead of the Africities conference being held in Marrakesh from 16-20 December. With a population of 40,000 in the 1980s, Kahemba, the border town between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, boomed to 150,000 people during the 1990s. Fed by a stream of commerce and trade in Angolan diamonds, the population has now fallen back to around 30,000-40,000. Shadowing the ebb and flow of people coming, staying, trading and going, African cities like Kahemba wax and wane.
It is now approaching full moon time for much of urban Africa. While headlines focus on the heady sprawl of megalopolises like Lagos, Cairo and Kinshasa, secondary cities like Arusha in Tanzania, Kano in Nigeria and Huambo in Angola are growing fast, often with little attention to planning. While the continent is experiencing a rapid growth in urban primacy, where most of a country’s people and investments are concentrated in one city, over two-thirds of Sub-Saharan Africans live in cities of between 100,000 to one million inhabitants, according to
Planning Sustainable Cities, a report published in October 2009 by the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN–HABITAT).
“Very often these cities are located at borders, at crossroads. They’re always places of meeting, where different trajectories meet each other, different pathways of accumulation become possible, where people can cross from one thing into the next,” says Filip de Boeck, professor of anthropology at the University of Leuven in
Belgium, who is leading a study on secondary cities in Africa.
Throughout history, it is only when central governments loosen the reins of control that secondary cities have sustained successful development. Parts of
Africa have a long history of such decentralisation. North
Africa emerged from colonisation with a stronger body of urban infrastructure than the rest of the continent, and this has continued ever since with a gradual policy of territorial reform. In 2006, the region had 4,200 of the continent’s 11,400 municipalities, four times as many as Central or Southern Africa, according to the Partenariat pour le Développement Municipal.
In South Africa, which has had a municipal movement since the 1920s, fiscal decentralisation was enshrined in the post-apartheid constitution. The bulk of the national budget is spent at the provincial level and the country uses a sophisticated mapping system to transfer funds to municipalities based on the number of inhabitants living under the poverty line. Federalised Nigeria also has a strong history of decentralisation and designating towns as state capitals, while Ethiopia, which faces an urbanisation rate of 2% over the next decade, is one of the few African countries to have drawn up a national urbanisation strategy and created a ministry to deal with the issue.
For the majority of countries, independence brought with it a reliance on the centralised model of colonial administration. Governments were often reluctant to give autonomy to local authorities, reinforcing decentralisation as an administrative technique rather than a function of
economic devolution. “The
normal tendency is for government to want to hold most financial resources and allocate them, rather than actually give the powers for revenue generation to the lower levels,” says Naison Mutizwa-Mangiza, chief of UN-Habitat’s policy branch.
Governments tend to see urban centres and the informal economies that characterise them as unwholesome and threatening. Faced with dysfunctional city services (see page 118) and stark inequality, city dwellers are often strong supporters of the opposition, as shown by the Movement for Democratic Change in Harare and the Orange Democratic Movement in Nairobi. Forming farm towns
The multilateral financiers of Africa’s urban landscapes have historically seen cities as distorted and parasitical, says AbdouMaliq Simone, professor at Goldsmiths University, London, who will publish a book in 2010 about cities in the global South. “They thought that Africans really didn’t belong in cities, that it was a rural place, that it should prioritise
agricultural production.”
Instead, a focus on commodity-driven economies has in turn stimulated and sustained smaller towns. And in the future, an increased focus on agriculture will precipitate transformation of smaller cities according to
Mutizwa-Mangiza. “We may see an emphasis on these much smaller cities, which service agricultural needs and act as service centres for inputs and markets for agricultural produce,” he says.
Still, the volume and speed in which Africans are migrating to the continent’s cities is beginning to ring alarm bells. Africa’s urban population, which stood at 14.5% in 1950, had risen to 38.7% in 2007. The UN predicts it will
almost double to reach 61.8% by 2050. Seventeen of the world’s fastest-growing cities with populations of more than one million are in Africa.
Policies aimed at limiting urbanisation often fall flat, and projects which aim to create new towns bring mixed results. In the 1980s, Egypt’s leaders decided to build cities in the desert in an
effort to ease pressure on Cairo, but according to the UN, six of the ‘first generation’ towns now have no less than one million inhabitants – far fewer than the target of 5m set for 2005.
Despite nearly giving away land for free and providing hefty incentives for businesses, Egypt’s ministry of infrastructure did not make the new cities attractive destinations for skilled workers. Cairo’s population is growing unabated and the UN predicts it will reach 14.4m in 2020.
African governments have failed to take the imaginative leap embraced by south-east Asian cities in their race for shining mega-developments. “When Manila looks on Bangkok, Bangkok looks on Jakarta, Jakarta looks on Singapore and Singapore looks on Shanghai, they see something similar, they see something recognisable,” says Simone.
Despite a multitude of
informal trade links and an influx of people, the governments in West Africa’s rapidly-expanding urban corridor – stretching from Abidjan to Accra to Lagos – have not enjoyed the same vision. “Over a long period of time there’s been a lack of imagination of taking
seriously the ways in which these cities could really do something for each other, could be connected to each other,” he says.
Instead, municipalities are displaying a growing preoccupation with cleaning up and controlling the environment. In Kinshasa, for example, the city is very strongly policed, with food-sellers chased out and streets sanitised. “A lot of urban policy by local governments seems to be built on modes of exclusion rather than inclusion,” says De Boeck. “[It is] who has a right to the city and who hasn’t.” This dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots will be further exacerbated in Kinshasa by the Cité du Fleuve, a new development underway on islands in the middle of the Congo River, which will house 500 people in a gated community.
Whichever way cities manage the populations they have today, they must also plan for the millions still to arrive. UN-Habitat advocates a policy of ‘guided land development’, encouraging cities to buy up surrounding farms and demarcate loosely where roads and houses will be built. Progressive policies in the early years of Zimbabwe’s independence saw Harare and Bulawayo do just this; today those farms are still being leased or used to generate income for the city councils. Nowadays, issues over land tenure and pressure from residents to improve service delivery will make this a difficult political reality for many municipalities.
Town planners needed
Perhaps the biggest challenge to decentralising Africa is improving the capacity of towns and cities to manage themselves. Better training for city planners will mean central governments should have more options in delegating decision-making. Civil servants often look at jobs in local administrations as a punishment, and local councillors are viewed with contempt by many city populations. Countries must work to change this image, and some have already started: Morocco and Mali have established territorial civil services with equal advantages to make local jobs more attractive. Local corruption – most common in land deals and kickbacks for construction – must also be tackled for councils to have more credibility.
African municipalities have to tread a fine line. Policies that are too obvious and heavy-handed in ridding cities of unsightly slums will win local governments no favours and may even ignite instability. Yet Africa’s
urban centres have always grown and will continue to grow and grow. Governments need to begin planning, fast. |
