Making Africa Work. Greg Mills

Food kiosks and vegetable sellers operate on the sidewalk in front of the ubiquitous pawn shops, shebeens, barbers’ shops, surgeries, strip joints, electronics outlets and butcheries, no-name businesses alongside high-street brands. Hillbrow’s businesses are, if anything, increasingly off the grid. A visit to the electronics traders in Esselen, Twist and Kotze streets, mostly run by Ibos and Bangladeshis, hints at a trend of increasing informalisation. No television licences are asked or quoted for, as is legally obligatory, or VAT, for that matter. For them, the cost of joining the formal sector, including paying tax, is greater than the advantages. It’s all in the margin.

      Further east, on Yeoville’s Raleigh Street, is the relatively orderly Congo Market. Inside, stalls run by Congolese and Nigerians sell blackened, smoked vundu, mostly from Zambia, salted, eviscerated tilapia, yams, brightly coloured Congolese wax fabrics, orange chillies and chilli oil, aubergines, sundry tins of groceries and plastic packets of tofu, rice and semolina. The prices are all much the same from stall to stall, and competitive.

      Overlooking Hillbrow is Ponte City, a 54-storey, 173-metre-high steel and concrete toilet roll, the tallest residential tower on the continent. It was built in 1975, when Hillbrow enjoyed the moniker the ‘Manhattan of Africa’.

      Designed by 29-year-old architect Rodney Grosskopff, as a symbol of 1970s skyscraper living and aspiration, Ponte was one of the first victims of inner-city decay as the middle class and their businesses fled for safer and more prosperous surrounds. By the late 1990s, rubbish had piled up five storeys high inside the building’s inner cylinder as the tower found itself engulfed by an area rife with crime, drugs, prostitution and guns. There was talk of turning it into a prison. Fifteen years later, however, Ponte City has been renovated and revitalised, and is now home to 3 000 students, professionals and workers, including South Africans, Nigerians, Congolese and Zimbabweans, all carefully choosing to ignore the Nigerians washing cars at the entrance and holding their noses against the thick smoke from burning rubbish. The monthly rent for a large flat is R5 000 – it’s good value and convenient, whatever the challenges of negotiating the vagaries of Primrose Terrace and Ponte’s neighbourhood.

      ‘Our residences have got to go up,’ says Grosskopff, ‘otherwise we’ll never get to work with the commuting distances and traffic involved. The question,’ he asks, ‘is not whether it’s the logical or scientific way to go; it’s whether society prefers it and will allow it?’3 And living where you work does significantly reduce the premium of transport.

      Hillbrow is not an isolated case of unplanned African growth and unrealised development potential – far from it. Just past the signs declaring ‘No Idling Allowed’, a facsimile of two giant elephant tusks welcomes visitors to Mombasa’s Daniel arap Moi International Airport. At the start of 2016, major construction was under way, widening Barack Obama Road first to four lanes and then to eight from the Changamwe roundabout to Mariakani, 36 kilometres north-west of Mombasa, on the road to Nairobi.

      The route through Mombasa to the Makupa Causeway, linking Mombasa Island to the mainland, is lined with dusty roadside stalls, their tatty tin frontages offering similar items: food, vegetables, fruit, Pepsi, Coke, airtime, shoes, clothes, cosmetics, books, building materials, and just about anything imaginable. The truck in front, its tailgate emblazoned with the words ‘Believe me I will be there’, weaves to avoid the tuk-tuks (when you switch on the engine they pronounce their name), boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) and matatus (minibuses), and works its way around the other trucks straddling the pavement and road.

      The Vatican Hotel, despite its name, offers little divine guidance at the busy Makupa roundabout leading onto Kenyatta Avenue, named after the country’s founding leader, where hawkers offer 10-shilling bags of peanuts, sliced pineapples, bananas and second-hand clothes. The traffic weaves to avoid the barrows laden with vegetables, fruit and household commodities, and their sweating human pushers. The four-lane Nyali Bridge, spanning the sea, provides the only route north and is next to the site of a new, top-end residential apartment development. To the south, plans are afoot to build a bridge to supplement the existing clumsy and time-consuming ferry service.

      Visitors to Mombasa would have been astounded by the ease of the flow of traffic today, even without the new infrastructure under construction. Apparently, according to the driver, President Uhuru Kenyatta came to the coast for a month and things got tidied up. The solution was simple: increase the number of lanes depending on the flow of traffic, and allocate traffic officers to police key intersections.

      As the primary port in East Africa, Mombasa is the centre of the coastal tourism industry in Kenya. Although it has the potential to serve as a motor of growth for Kenya and the East Africa region, Mombasa processes the same amount of cargo (780 000 containers4) in one year that the world’s most active ports (Shanghai and Singapore) handle in a week.5

      Beyond the port, Mombasa continues to struggle to develop its economy. It’s a costly place to do business. Despite being the second-largest city in Kenya and one of its most prominent economic hubs, it ranked only sixth out of 13 Kenyan cities in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index.6 Access to finance is limited, and job and market information scarce.7 About 80 per cent of Mombasa’s population of 1.2 million live in informal settlements, which cover more than 90 per cent of the land area, and almost 40 per cent live below the poverty line.8

      The majority participate only, or at least predominantly, in the informal sector, doing low value-added jobs.

      There are also layers of insecurity, related both to Mombasa’s role as a transit point for drugs and the legendary corruption among port officials and customs officers. The city’s predominantly Muslim character adds further complexity. Between 2012 and 2014, for example, no fewer than 21 Islamic clerics were gunned down in the city. Radicalism and criminality have appeal in the absence of other opportunities.9 Some of Mombasa’s youth have, in particular, declared that they are ‘no longer part of Kenya’.10

      Given its strategic location as the gateway to East Africa, Mombasa is so far a missed development opportunity, where the downsides of crime and terrorism both demonstrate and exacerbate the costs of weak governance. Dealing with the root causes will demand action on a wide range of fronts, from improving the efficiency of the port, which requires hitherto unseen levels of political will, to breaking and reshaping corrupt systems, to investment in both hard and soft educational and vocational infrastructure. It’s a big task.

      Hillbrow and Mombasa are illustrative of Africa’s looming urban and demographic challenges, though cities hold out the promise of accelerated development.

      The advantage of cities

      In Europe the focus is now on African migration across the Mediterranean. The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than a million migrants arrived in Europe by sea in 2015 and almost 34 900 by land, compared to a total of 280 000 arrivals by land and sea for the whole of 2014. And these figures do not include those who got into Europe undetected.11 Migrants come mainly from West Africa, the Horn of Africa and, since 2013, those fleeing the civil war in Syria. The figures could be much greater, now and in the future. There may be as many as 1 million waiting in Libya alone to continue their often perilous journey across the sea to Europe.12

      But, within Africa, for the last hundred years there has been a much greater number of migrants of a different sort – a number that is rapidly growing. These are the flow of rural Africans into cities, as Figure 1.1 illustrates, as well as the flow of Africans over their borders into other African states.

      Historically, such urban growth has been good news for development and jobs. Urban agglomerations help provide economies of scale for people as a labour pool and ease the delivery of infrastructure and services. They also solve two major challenges to improved productivity: connectivity and energy.13 As developed countries move away from manufacturing towards services as a source of employment, density may become less critical, given that many can work from home. By contrast, however, in those economies where jobs are driven by manufacturing, which some in Africa hope to benefit from, density of housing with efficient transport to the workplace is all important. Success in mass transportation requires density in accommodation.

      Africa has so far missed out on urban-led growth. According to a 2007 study of