Globalization, Cities and the Challenges of Governance: A Preliminary Study of Kaduna City, Nigeria

Abstract

In the last two decades, the world has experienced phenomenal levels of urbanization. According to informed estimates, in the near future more than half of the world’s population will live in cities, and that the number of cities with more than five-to-ten million inhabitants will continue to rise. By its projections, the Berlin Roundtables on Trans-nationality expects that by 2015, about 60 cities will have more than five million people and megacities like Mumbai, Karachi, Mexico city, Lagos, Beijin, etc, are to reach an urban population of more than 20 million.  Interestingly, as the Berlin Roundtables further noted, “it is the global South that is creating an image of an urban planet, which fundamentally challenges our         Western, if not Eurocentric image of “the city”(2008;1).

That countries of the South are in the fore of this unprecedented growth of cities is not much of a big question as the implications. On a general note, this development is said to be driven by such factors as; global economic trends, surplus unskilled labour and the flow of global capital and information networks. Therefore, as one of the leading African economies, Nigeria couldn’t have been insulated from the impact of these forces of urbanization.  According to the 1991 census report, the number of urban centres with population of 20,000 and above was 359. It estimated that there would be at least 500 urban centres by 2001.  A major concern with the exponential growth of urban population in Nigeria is the problem of meeting growing public expectations in the face of the increasing roll-back of the Nigerian state from the domain of public provisioning.. In other words, the roll-back of the state, on one hand, coupled with the rapid rate of urbanization in Nigeria is reconfiguring social, cultural, economic, political, etc, spaces in a manner that posses new challenges of governing such spaces. Like most “megacities” in Nigeria, Kaduna faces a number of transformational problems associated with its fast changing urban landscape. Of such problems, mention must be made of infrastructure collapse, population density, dual economies, poverty, crime, high levels of social fragmentation, etc, all of which constitute a credible threat to security in the state and beyond.