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 90 developing countries, Africa is the only region where urbanisation does not correlate with poverty reduction (as highlighted in the Introduction).14 And, according to the Brookings Institute, unlike other regions, African urbanisation has not been driven by increasing agricultural productivity or by industrialisation. Rather, African cities are centres of consumption, where the rents extracted from natural resources are spent by the rich. Thus, African cities have largely failed to install the infrastructure that has made cities elsewhere places of prosperity.15
Instead of capitalising on the advantages of agglomerations, there remain acute problems in Africa (as will be explained in Chapter 7), notably in electricity generation and transmission, and where the effect of migration has been to produce more and more congestion, rather than enhanced connectivity. More than half of sub-Saharan Africans in cities live in slums, with just 40 per cent having access to proper sanitation facilities. These are the same ratios as in 1990. Africa’s urban child dependency ratio is 40 per cent higher than in Latin America and 65 per cent higher than that of Asia.
Cities inhabit the space where implementation occurs, where the policy rubber has to hit the road, where policymakers come face to face with society’s problems. Although the role of municipal actors is frequently overlooked, their direct influence is often greater than that of presidents. Indeed, the rise of national governments in policymaking and implementation is a relatively recent global phenomenon, spurred on by globalisation, the need to raise armies (especially given the last century’s world wars) and the national importance of managing inequality.
City governments are inherently pragmatic and less partisan, since their job is to ‘clean the streets’ regardless of their political allegiances. Mayors are by necessity not legislative but executive. Or, as Teddy Kollek, who ran Jerusalem for 28 years, once put it in trying to negotiate between Israeli and Palestinian communities, ‘Spare me your sermons, and I’ll fix your sewers.’16
Still, for all their coalface responsibilities, cities mostly lack the policy tools. As Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, an expert on urban development, said, ‘Cities are the best path we know out of poverty. They are the best transformers of civilizations. But, there are also demons that come with density.’17
Figure 1.1: Africa: Urbanisation and population, 1950–2050
Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DataQuery/
One challenge is that the political environment and boundaries have not kept pace with the rate and reality of expansion. There is a need for a clear demarcation between city and national responsibility, combined with the appropriate delegation of authority and allocation of resources to city governments. In an era when mayors are supposed to ‘rule the world’, given the burgeoning size of their immediate constituencies, local authorities have limited authority and few funding tools and resources.
A second challenge is that of inequality, and the stresses and strains this presents. For example, the centrepiece of South Africa’s tourism industry, Cape Town, is nevertheless a study in contrasts. Drawn by the backdrop of opulent coastal mansions, pristine beaches and ‘old’ wealth, visitors arriving at Cape Town International Airport are often shocked to pass through miles of squalid squatter camps where basic sanitation and electricity remain elusive luxuries. A reminder of the injustices of apartheid, the city’s wealth inequality is mirrored by spatial divisions. The poor and gang-ridden suburbs of the Cape Flats and the townships spread interminably away from the heart of the city, with the consequence that the people who live in those areas have a long way to travel to their places of work.
Still, the city remains an attractive destination for migrants from all over the country and the continent. The result has been massive pressure on housing, basic service delivery and public-transport systems, and more than anything, jobs.
According to Tim Harris, former Head of Investment for the City of Cape Town government, the authorities
