IT HAS been a week since Mohammed Sani moved to Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. A scrawny 22-year old from Kebbi State in the north-west, he came looking for work. He has certainly found it. At 5am each morning he fills ten 25-litre plastic jugs with water from a borehole, paying 20 naira for each one (about $0.05). He then pulls them around Yaba, his new neighbourhood, on a cart, selling each one for 25 naira. By sunset at 7pm he has perhaps 700 naira of profit ($2) in his pocket—not much in Lagos. “If I find a better business, I will try it,” he says. But for the moment, this is as good at it gets.
Young people migrate to cities the world over looking for opportunity. Lagos, a sprawling lagoon city of some 21m people (pictured), is no exception. In dense traffic jams, young men weave through the cars selling plastic pouches of drinking water and tissues. On street corners they run generators and will charge your phone or photocopy a document. But most people never get much further than where they start: working extraordinarily hard for very little. Migrants to African cities are not worse off than they were in the countryside. If that were...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2cQM9Yw
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