Environment

NIGERIA: Focus on pollution in Lagos

2002-06-20, Issue 69

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/8426

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The clouds of smog that daily blur the skyline of the central business area of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos, are the most obvious signs that air pollution is a major problem in one of Africa's biggest cities. Less obvious is the increasing toll on the health of the city's 12 million residents.


NIGERIA: Focus on pollution in Lagos

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]


LAGOS, 20 June (IRIN) - The clouds of smog that daily blur the skyline of the central business area of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos, are the most obvious signs that air pollution is a major problem in one of Africa's biggest cities. Less obvious is the increasing toll on the health of the city's 12 million residents.

According to medical sources, respiratory ailments due to air pollution have become one of the leading problems encountered in the city's hospitals. At the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, the leading health institution in the city, about one-fifth of all ailments reported by the hospital's patients in the past two years were related to various degrees of respiratory problems, officials said.

"Most of the ailments present either as pneumonia or bronchitis," Festus Ezeobi, a medical consultant, told IRIN. "But generally they are inflammations of the air passages caused often by chemical pollutants or bacteria." In two decades he has observed such cases increase ten-fold, he said.

Medical experts do not find the development surprising considering that Lagos is a city of cars and electricity generators. One of the few large cities of several million people in the world without an intra-city rail system, it is solely dependent on road transportation. Residents who do not own cars depend on privately-run taxis and buses. It is estimated that there are at least two million vehicles in the city, with up to half plying the city's roads everyday.

"Out of this number over two-thirds are more than 10 years old," Taiwo Olamide, an official of the ministry of transport told IRIN. Another third of the total vehicle population of the city are more than 15 years old, he said. According to him most of these vehicles would not pass standard emission tests in the developed countries. Yet they are to be seen daily on the Lagos roads emitting dark, poisonous fumes into the atmosphere.

Irregular electricity supply by the state-owned power company, has made Nigeria one of the biggest markets for electricity generators in the world. Every skyscraper in the city is usually serviced by at least four giant standby generators. And once there is a power cut, which is quite often, they roar into life, puffing thick, dark smoke into the atmosphere. Most homes also use generators, all contributing noxious fumes to the atmosphere.

Recent studies carried out by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA) show a moderate to high concentration of pollutants - such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, organic acids and hydrocarbons - in the atmosphere. Most of these come from automotive engines and industries.

Older people who lived in Lagos in the 1950s and 1960s still idealise what was then an orderly and uncongested city. Until the early 1970s, there were barely one million people living in less than 15 percent of the space the city occupies today. The massive influx of people into the city coincided with Nigeria's oil boom years from the mid 1970s. Much of the country's oil wealth spent in the cities, particularly Lagos, which was then the capital, made it a major attraction for the hordes of rural-urban migrants.

With the great proliferation of cars that came with oil wealth, successive (mainly military) governments responded with a massive construction of new roads, including ring roads and flyovers, to overcome the consequent traffic congestion. More people flooded into the city at a rate which would not permit orderly expansion and settled on the outskirts. Soon the outskirts became city centres as more and more people found homes in the peripheries. A new, sprawling Lagos was created.

The decision in 1976 to move the capital from Lagos to Abuja in the centre of the country, was also aimed at dealing with the problem of congestion. But it remains the country's commercial capital and a major attraction for migrants from all over Nigeria and different parts of Africa, seeking improved fortunes.

An intra-city rail tube system planned by the civilian government in power between 1979-83 was scrapped by the military regime that ousted it from power. A new system has yet to get off the ground since then.

Today, Lagos lacks a central sewage system and has no refuse incinerators. Sewage is still emptied into the lagoon while household refuse is collected by the waste authorities at a central dump to the north of the city, where it is burnt, sending plumes of acrid smoke into the sky at all times.

According to Nigeria's junior minister for environment, Imeh Okopido, the country's marine environment, especially around Lagos, is being increasingly degraded by pollution from sewage, industrial effluents, radioactive substances, heavy metals, oils and litter. In April he set up a special task force to develop the framework for a national plan of action to halt further degradation of the environment.

But already there is the danger that some of these chemicals are finding their way into the food chain and doing as yet inestimable damage. Fishing communities which abound in Lagos depend on the lagoon and the sea around the city - the main recipients of the pollutants - for much of their catch consumed by the same city residents.

Beginning this year, President Olusegun Obasanjo banned the importation of cars more than five years old into Nigeria. While no other specific measures, such as checking emissions levels of cars and electricity generators, have been put in place to deal with air pollution, curtailing the influx of very old cars into the country is expected to have a positive effect with time.

Efforts to rejuvenate the electricity company and end power cuts, if successful, will cut down on the emissions from the hundreds of thousands generators now in service in the city.

But according to a FEPA document: "The paucity of data, inadequate monitoring...lack of operational national contingency plan for hazardous chemicals, as well as a national register and tracking system for toxic and hazardous chemicals, are gaps that need to be filled soon."

[ENDS]

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