Urban imaginaries: funding mega infrastructure projects in Lagos, Nigeria

In today’s globalized world, mega infrastructure projects have emerged as one of the most popular strategies for attracting private capital and repositioning cities on the competitive landscape. The Lagos Megacity Project (LMCP) was launched to address a longstanding infrastructure crisis and to reinvent Lagos as a modern megacity. Using the LMCP as a case study, the paper examined the challenges facing the funding of mega infrastructure projects. Special attention is given to how capital is mobilized, the kinds of alliances or networks found and what gets prioritized. The paper observed that the alliance formed between the federal, Lagos and Ogun state governments to mobilize public funds quickly unraveled largely due to disputes traceable to the apportioning of fiscal and political responsibilities and the distribution of functions between the different tiers of government. Under the LMCP, disputes emerged between the federal government and the Lagos State Government (LSG) over who was responsible for what. A history of opposition politics and a highly politicized resource allocation system further made cooperation between the two particularly difficult. Furthermore, the LMCP signalled a renewed drive by the LSG to attract private investments through public–private partnership. The paper noted a host of problems but crucially there is a preference for elite projects, a practice that is reinforcing socio-spatial exclusion and confirms the persistent inequalities that accompany neoliberal and modernist projects. At the broadest level, the paper points to how modernist projects are fractured or undermined by specific ideologies and practices.