The enterprise of fire safety services in Lagos, Nigeria.

• Author: Cobin, John M.
• Position: Essay

Lagos State must surely rank among the ugliest large urban centers in the world. The city is filthy and dingy. Litter is strewn on nearly every street and roadway, and almost everyone litters without shame. Smoke rises incessantly from vehicle exhaust and trash fires. Rusty signs, often badly in need of repainting, are commonplace. A clean bathroom with soap and running water is considered a marvel. (1) On top of all of this, the area is incredibly hot and humid, especially in the dry season, with 100 percent humidity and temperatures of 30 to 35 degrees Centigrade, making life very unpleasant. Fans and air conditioners are wonderful, at least when there is electricity to run them. The power goes out many times during the day because the state-run facility simply cannot cope with demand. Nigeria is still plagued by yellow fever and malaria, too, and is one of the few countries left in the world that continues to have a problem with polio. Nigeria is certainly part of the Third World.

Most Lagos State buildings are dingy and poorly built, especially outside of the relatively better Ikoyi, Victoria Island, and Lekki Peninsula sections that house the upper class. Even the downtown area on Lagos Island is grimy, with largely deteriorated buildings surrounded by hordes of shantytown markets. But even in the nicer sections, there seems to be scant concept of neighborhood cooperation. More often than not, filth and ugliness surround even the nicer homes. Upper-class people find a haven in their homes and gardens, which serve as islands in an otherwise pathetic and intolerable city. These nicer areas have standard supermarkets; I visited exactly five decent ones (if the new Goodies store in Ikeja is counted). There are a couple of miniature malls with clean bathrooms that are reminiscent of those in the First World. It is a drop of the First World in the midst of the Third World, yet prices are at least double those found in the First World.

Unlike in many large cities, the streets in Lagos are not generally lined with trees and grass, even though it is equatorial and thus has plenty of rainfall and could easily support plant life. The few parks that exist are found next to noisy and congested off-ramps. Many unfinished cement block buildings add to the overall ugliness, standing several stories tall and blighting every area of the city. If one word can be used to describe market activity and residential and business neighborhoods, it would be disorder. That is not to say that markets do not work. It means rather that the state has failed to provide services properly, distorting the benefits of markets that one sees in other places, and that the markets that do exist have produced unsavory results owing to intervention and corruption.

Traffic jams and general congestion are the worst I have experienced in visits to sixty-eight countries. A thirty-kilometer commute can take as much as three hours in the morning and require the same penalty again in the evening. Highways are lined with informal salesmen who vend phone cards, water, bacteria-laden meat and shrimp (simmering in the hot sun), snacks, watches, mirrors, cushions, irons, sunglasses, cotton swabs, magazines, beverages, and almost anything else you can imagine. These obstacles, along with untold numbers of people scampering across the highway, make one's driving experience highly stressful. Horns are used at least as much as brakes so that cars can pass safely without being rammed. In sum, driving is pure chaos. (2)

Wastewater ditches line nearly every street, and men can often be seen urinating into them. Otherwise, the men find a convenient wall, many of which are painted with instructions not to urinate there. Temporary huts and older buildings are infested with small businesses on nearly every road in the metropolitan area. The government supplies power, but the power can easily go out ten to twenty times per day. When the lights fail, people start up myriad portable generators to keep computers, phones, lights, and refrigerators working, even if irons and air conditioners cannot function.

In short, Lagos is a chaotic, trash-ridden, ugly, dirty, smoky, and incredibly congested metropolitan area of more than 7 million people. Akaehomen Ibhadode, a renowned author and professor of manufacturing engineering at the University of Benin, hit the nail on the head when he said: "I weep for Nigeria each time I visit foreign countries" (Aliu 2011). Lagos is not a desirable place to live, so it has attracted little or no foreign immigration from the First World (other than that required by work), although it has received a massive influx of Nigerian poor.

In this essay, I examine one of the central concerns of such overwhelming congestion characterized by out-of-control development, high population, and extreme poverty: fire. More specifically, I look at the enterprise of fire safety services in Lagos: Who provides them, and how well are they provided? At the heart of these questions is the issue of who can best provide them: the government or private enterprises? My research indicates that private initiatives seem to have had more success.

Ignorance of Building Rules in Lagos

Many people I spoke to mentioned that Nigerians do not follow the rules for building. Yet the critics themselves admit that they do not know what the rules are. How can a citizen be expected to know the legislation and follow the rules when he has no idea what they are? A copy of the national building code is not available in libraries or online. It can only be special ordered at an exorbitant cost of nearly U.S.$80. The state rules are scarcely available, but copies can be obtained by visiting the Gazette Office (printing office) in the state government building complex. The state code is certainly not within easy reach of common citizens, either. Furthermore, professional organizations do not have a copy of either of these codes. Even nine places in the Lagos area that one might expect to have copies of the national and state building codes do not have them: (3)

1. Nigerian Society of Engineers (4)

2. Nigerian Institute of Building (5)

3. Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria (6)

4. Lagos State Development and Property Corporation (7)

5. Nigerian Institute of Architecture (8)

6. Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (9)

7. National Library of Nigeria, Yaba, Lagos (l0)

8. Nigerian Law School, Victoria Island, Lagos

9. British Council Library (for preindependence codes) (11)

   Quality of Buildings and Fire Hazards in Lagos State

   The quality of construction in Lagos State generally is not up to par with First World standards. Although this fact may not be surprising, one might presume that the number of fires in buildings depends on the quality of construction and the type of elements used for heating, cooking, and lighting. Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 provide basic building data for 2006. (12) Lagos homes use significant amounts of materials and fuels that presumably increase fire danger. Thus, one might expect to see more fires in Lagos relative to First World cities. For instance, 3.9 percent of Lagos homes use dangerous roofing materials (for example, thatch, leaves, bamboo, sticks, or rough-cut wood boards), 6.5 percent cook with firewood or animal dung as fuel, and 2.1 percent use candles, coal, or other nonstandard fuels for lighting. Moreover, 3.5 percent have earthen floors, casting doubt on the quality of the home's construction in general. When we observe what is found in the city, these percentages seem surprisingly low. Many of Lagos's "homes" would be considered shacks and shanties by visitors from the First World. Perhaps the way the tabular statistics are collected fosters a sort of generosity in classification for particular items, but when a home is taken as a whole, reasons for concern about quality are evident. Offices and shops, including some fire stations, are hardly any better. At any rate, using the tabular data or simple observation, one might think that Lagos would have more building fires per capita than many other large metropolitan areas.

   Using Privatized Fire Services

   Negative externalities are compounded in cities, and fires are perhaps their most egregious and terrifying form. For that reason, urbanization leads to restrictions on the use of land and real property. The government's stated role ideally is to guarantee security of private-property ownership (Pipes 2000, 117), "to make possible the operation of a definite system of social cooperation under the principle of the division of labor" (Mises [1988], 1991, 34), without which entrepreneurship and even civilization itself cease to exist (Mises [1949] 1996, 264). Good institutions reduce transactions costs, increase available information, and enhance social cooperation. But is government-sponsored building regulation the best alternative?

   Privatization is now widely recognized as a laudable social-welfare-maximizing paradigm, especially "spontaneous privatization," which occurs when state assets come under private control with little or no government coordination (Zygmont 1994, 452). Volunteer fire departments are a good example of such spontaneity. By way of comparison, the National Fire Protection Association Web site indicates that 71 percent of the total number of firefighters in the United States (812,500 out of 1,148,100) were volunteers in 2011, with the great majority of them (73 percent) working in small towns and rural areas. (13) Of course, not having to pay 812,500 people even part-time wages represents a substantial cost savings, especially when one considers that wages are 90 percent of the total cost of a paid department (Poole [1980] 1988, 307, 308).

   Fire safety bureaus can contract services out to the private sector either by privatizing completely or by implementing a model that combines public and private provision, thus serving as a conduit for more efficient provision...