Gimba Kakanda

Abuja is a young city. It was born in 1991, officially. Addis Ababa, by contrast, was born in 1886, making it almost 140 years old. Their age difference is 104 years. Yet the Ethiopian city still parades its fair share of slums, neglected districts, and street beggars. I make this point because you obviously have never been there and have relied on a single image of a country that, just 25 years ago, was the third-poorest country in the world, to mock your nation’s capital. And that even revealed a rather narrow idea of what a city should look like. A city is not measured by the presence of tall, shiny buildings. Skyscrapers are not a universal marker of urban success, nor should they be a priority for Abuja. They are largely a response to population density and land scarcity. We think Abuja suffers from these because we have not had an FCT minister with city-planning skills in a long time. Land is not a scarce commodity here. What the city needs is functional infrastructure that allows for orderly expansion and eases demographic pressure on its existing districts, not vertical congestion for its own sake. The irony is that most of the shiny edifices you now see in Addis Ababa, including that green roundabout you think is the hallmark of a modern city (as if we don’t have Unity Fountain in Wuse 2, or a roundabout with a basketball court in Life Camp, and a demolished one with a football pitch also in Life Camp), were built within the last five years. The Addis Ababa I met less than ten years ago could easily be compared to a city like Kaduna, which tells you how much can change within the span of a single term. Nigeria, after all, is one of the few African countries that can boast of more than 50 urban centres capable of absorbing growth if hold our governors to account. It is also worth noting that some of the world’s most admired cities are not defined by skyscrapers. Cities like Paris and Rome have few to no high-rise buildings, and so does America’s Abuja, Washington, D.C. Yet they rank among the most functional and liveable cities in the world. By contrast, cities like New York and Singapore build vertically because land is a serious constraint. Even Oman, an oil-rich country, has developed without an obsession for shiny skyscrapers. Abuja has, no doubt, suffered from leadership gaps and weak city management in the past. But now Nyesom Wike is doing the Lord’s work. Before him, we had a mannequin in charge of Abuja for eight straight years. In the meantime, enjoy these views of Abuja.

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