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Tactical doctrine stresses
that urban combat operations are conducted only when required and that
built-up areas are isolated and bypassed rather than risking a costly,
time-consuming operation in this difficult environment. Adherence to these
precepts, though valid, is becoming increasingly difficult as urban sprawl
changes the face of the battlefield. The acronym MOUT (Military Operations
on Urbanized Terrain) classifies those military actions planned and conducted
on a terrain complex where manmade construction impacts on the tactical
options...Commanders must treat the elements of urban sprawl as terrain
and know how this terrain affects the capabilities of their units and
weapons.
—Military Operations in Urban Terrain Field
Manual, US Army TRADOC
M.O.U.T.
Like Pynchon's London, Lagos, Nigeria, exerts
a psychological effect of unrelenting and seemingly unpatterned danger.
The resulting urbanism has, at every scale and every level of formality,
engaged insecurity as a critical determinant of form. The relationship of military action to urbanism is, in Lagos,
a staggering complexity. Under military rule for all but six years of
its independence, Nigeria as a culture is thoroughly infected by military
thought and organizational logic. The dual processes of "democratization"
and "privatization," led by former General Olusegun Obasanjo,
may result in a demilitarized government, but militarization of the urban
environment is a process that works, and one that is more likely predictive
of our collective urban future, than exemplary of a freak urban condition.
Militarized Urbanization illustrates the
effects (lasting and ephemeral) of military action and governance upon
Lagos and Abuja. As Nigeria's primate city and, until 1992, national capitol,
Lagos has played host to innumerable acts of political violence, and no
less than ten credible attempted coups (in addition to numerous doomed
or counterfeit coups). The high success rate of coups d'etat—and the open relief expressed by government agents
upon removal of the capitol to Abuja—suggests something fundamental in
Lagos that is conducive to (counter)revolution. Like Haussmann's Paris,
action has been taken to restructure Lagos for security, with mixed and
unpredictable results. At the same time, government and lifestyle in the
city has evolved to reflect official insecurity, producing a lifestyle
and behavioral logic of the Lagosian which owes as much to basic training
as to more anthropologically interesting cultural predilections.
Understanding of the spatial logic of Lagos
and environs can be augmented by a view not often publicly considered,
in the case of the western city: that of the military planner. Urban Militarization
considers the objects, forms and processes of interest to the modern military
logistician, which coincide with the hardiest and most productive sectors
of the Lagos urban economy. The logic of Lagos, or of individual agents
working within the urban network, is in many cases closer to a tactical
military organization than a civilian plan. Coincidentally, the rise of
a new "terrain type," the "third world megacity,"
has produced a flood of literature from military scientists, strategists
and policymakers who find their forces and, by proxy, their agendas, confounded
by unfamiliar patterns of urbanization in cities like Lagos. The frequent
intersection—at the individual level—between the processes of taking over
cities and commuting in them illustrates a new state of being. It is possible
that neither war nor peace are, in absolute terms, possible in this landscape,
and that they have been replaced in Lagos by a constant condition of barely-manageable
insecurity.
The complementary processes of militarization
and urbanization have produced a material culture of Cross-Fertilization.
From navigation to infrastructure-provision, military operations provide
models, and in some cases materiel, incubating and accelerating a militarized
lifestyle for the civilian population of Lagos. Organization and authority
have likewise been compromised and expanded, with civil institutions adopting
military organizational logic. Of course, the impact works in reverse
as well, and privatization/civilianization of military forces is not only
formal. From the level of national infrastructure and defense planning
to the decentralized world of private security, private individuals and
institutions borrow from a contracting military class the material, processes
and even verbiage that characterize the mythical construction of the city.
While the formal construction of the city
has been shaped by Generals as often as by planners, however, the logic
of the city is essentially decentralized. Individual decisions and inhabitation
are informed by security concerns, which are as often as not unfounded,
or entirely wrong. Action at the top levels of government, however, has
focused selectively on those targets that represent the remaining fraction
of a percentage of the Lagos landscape, leaving individual landowners
and users to fend for themselves.
Compli-City
According to standard military tactics,
Lagos, like all complex urban arenas, is operative "terrain to be
avoided" in the prosecution of large-scale operations. But it seems
to offer numerous advantages to the "lone gunman." Isolated
violent acts, such as assassination, bombing and kidnapping, have occurred
with such frequency that it seems likely that the terrain of the city
in fact functions as a kind of accomplice to acts of political violence.
The perpetual snarl and confusion of the congested city that endeavor
to confound logistically-dependent operation work on behalf of the small-scale
operation, providing opportunities for ambush and surprise which can nullify
material or numerical advantage. The 1975 assassination of General Murtala
Muhammed and the associated failed coup, illustrate the varied abilities
of the city in this regard, and expose the anti-authoritarian political
subconscious of Lagos. Muhammed, a prominent northern officer, had been
in office only six months. His assassination, on 13 February, 1976, was
initiated by Lieutenant Colonel Bukar Dimka and a cadre of nearly forty
associates of the previous regime of General Yakubu Gowan, then in exile
in London. The successful assassination of Muhammed was facilitated by
the prodigious traffic problem of metropolitan Lagos. The leader's Mercedes
was riddled with bullets as it sat immobilized in a go-slow (the car now sits in the National Museum), prompting
neighboring Niger to enact a law prohibiting motorists from overtaking
the prime minister's car, or any part of his official caravan.
Choke Points
In fact the Muhammed assassination is only
one of numerous instances that illustrate the ability of Lagos to swallow
figures of power or authority. The formal logic of Lagos in the post-squandermania
period is ever more unpredictable in this regard. The overlain systems
of high-capacity highways and irregular, informal settlement between (and
upon), creates innumerable conditions of conflict and difficult transition,
as when six-lane highway projects run out of Naira and become two lanes.
The vulnerability of the well-heeled traveler, to both violence and salesmanship
is, enhanced by the peristaltic, stop-and-go condition, and this condition
is exploited by area boys for financial gain. The imposition of the Marina
bus stop on the Lagos Island expressway is one such condition, where unused
median terrain is appropriated, by threat of force, and passage is offered
for a "toll" to vehicles mired in an epic go-slow caused by
the expansion of this major informal transit node into the traveling lanes
of the superhighway. Almost every connection of the high-speed and surface
road networks in Lagos offers similar possibilities for paralysis and
vulnerability. Informal toll collection, robbery, murder and (in at least
one case) cannibalism, all are prospective fates of which the Lagosian
driver is keenly aware at every decision to leave the expressway, such
that taxi drivers must be conscious of the safe hours to travel each of
several urban expressways. Murtala Muhammed airport is one destination
that most drivers will explain is simply not safe to travel to between
10pm and 7am, as the national police are unable to patrol the stretch
of the Agege motor road that links it to Lagos Island.
The collective unconscious that creates
traffic jams, and the entrepreneurial land tenure that alleviates them,
are not, however, the only generators of vulnerability. The construction
of the Third Mainland Bridge has added a new and quasi-official dimension
to the vulnerability of the independent commuter, and a form which is
the result of desolation, rather than congestion. Rogue National Police
officers from Ogun State, deployed to Lagos during the OPC riots of 1999,
and apparently unpaid for several months, have at this writing taken over
the bridge as a fund-raiser. The bridge—perhaps not coincidentally—provides
an ideal scenario for a choke-point. A seemingly interminable raised highway,
with concrete barriers and water on either side, and no exits for the
first kilometer or so, allows no opportunity to reverse course upon seeing
a blockade, and the relative lack of traffic at night allows police forces
to isolate the traveler and extract a fee for passage. The informal linear
development of residential areas such as Ajegunle (combing) establish
a similar scenario at ground level.
Normative Militarization
The militarization of social activities
and lifestyle in Lagos pervades language in even the most normative sectors
of "westernization." The eight-year history of the Air Assault
Open Golf Championship, and its ascendancy to the position of the richest
tournament purse in Nigeria, is a case study in the pernicious transfer
of military terminology into this most normative class and event, the
world of professional golf.
The tournament, which takes its name from
the Nigerian Air Force squadron garrisoned next to the championship course
at Bori Camp, Port Harcourt, is the apotheosis of the past twenty-five
years of social militarization. Fatigue appears to have set in with the
adoption of acronyms for every noun, and the use of military terminology
for social movements and government agendas. The use of such terminology
to refer to perhaps the most counter-revolutionary institution in any
society, the country club, illustrates the meaningless of military signification
in a completely militarized milieu.
M.O.O.T.W.
The relatively new idea of M.O.O.T.W. (Military
Operations Other Than War) is a result of the change in typical missions
for national militaries in the post-Cold War era. The increasing prevalence
of low-intensity conflict and terrorism, replacing the more familiar unlimited
engagement threats have presented challenges (and embarrassing defeats)
to traditional military forces, and have forced the development of new
doctrines designed specifically for peacekeeping, anti-insurgency, election-supervision
and other low-intensity situations. This class of engagements has, in
the last twenty years, become overwhelmingly urban in deployments, and
requires a kind of logic that lies somewhere between civilian and military,
projecting power and mobility, while operating under extreme restrictions
on violence and lethality. It is also a tactical doctrine that, in the
wording of field manuals and graphic aids, frequently seems to approximate
a guide to life, exchange and transit in Lagos.
The notion of military operations, or modes
of operation, which are not necessarily violent has spawned an explosion
of specialized skill sets in modern armed forces. The exponential increase
in the complexity of transit and communications required of technological
warfare, as well as the terrain challenges of urban combat, have defined
a new set of behaviors, material strategies, and modes of occupation which
approximate the conditions of commuting, distribution and commerce in
a city such as Lagos. Characteristic of this lifestyle is the necessity
for assertive control of territory without overt violence (flexscape),
extension of operating parameters and lifespan of equipment (mechanics),
and hardening or defensive decentralization alteration of communications,
power and transit (Alaba).
These common tactical missions for modern
national militaries are being executed by civilians in advance of crisis
in metropolitan Lagos, making one wonder if in fact the city is better
prepared for disaster than the western city. Reliance of major buildings
and even entire residential developments on the city's power grid and
telecom infrastructure has already been reduced to near zero, and the
privatization of transit function, due to crises in public management,
has reduced dependence on government in nearly every aspect of infrastructural
provision. The technological defeat of dependency in Lagos is actually
a decentralized program of research, which is being done at much greater
expense in Idaho and Utah, by right-wing religious fanatics predicting
apocalypse or race war. The ultimate goal of this crisis-response, of
course, is predictability (whether of power, water, or security).
Life During Wartime
Paralleling the city's unrelenting bodily
threat to figures of authority, Lagos has developed economic structures
and agents that in many ways approximate wartime economies. Responding
to fiscal crises and attendant infrastructure lack, the agents and markets
of the unofficial economy are sophisticated, and produce effects which
are sometimes best analyzed by analogy to the large-scale illiquidity
of wartime markets. Primary among these effects is the overlay of extreme
decadence on a fundamentally efficient decentralized "system"
of distribution.
This analogy is not limited to functional
distribution of products, but includes the black and gray markets as producers
of cultural mythology, creating a city-image of illicit danger. The romantic
aspect of this economy appropriates the modernist myth of hyper-capitalism,
the situation of total liquidity of tangible and qualitative media of
exchange, applying it as a mask of challenge, danger and infinite opportunity
analogous to the Vienna of Graham Greene. The thriving cinema of Lagos,
primarily no-budget video productions, reflects this mythological construction
of the city. The majority of the films sold in the retail markets tend
toward almost operatic dramas of crime and moral flexibility, chronicling
the excesses of the fast-living newly arrived, and the connections between
the criminal underworld and these big men and women. The association of
criminal activity with the distribution of lifestyle and decadence, whether
in The Third Man, or Owo Blow. the Revolt, illustrates the
symbolic possibility of the city-in-crisis, as an arena that heightens
both risk and reward.
Nymphostructures
Land pressures and regularly scheduled economic
crises have necessitated cross-pollination of productive and non-productive
economic sectors, spawning a variety of obscene combinations. Confusion
and cooperation between official and legitimate infrastructures within
a sector or service is well documented, but frequently these tangled symbioses
extend between industries, creating illicit dependencies that approximate
institutional adultery. Again approximating a wartime economy, the symbiosis-a-trois
between
prostitutes, universities and water infrastructure is an extreme example.
Essentially, bake sakes and car washes provide operating budgets for universities,
which provide security and accommodation for prostitutes, who provide
private water-infrastructure to parts of the city.
A recent Daily Times article features an
Agege-area prostitute. Her phenomenal success in this ancient trade amassed
a fortune sufficient to build a large urban mansion, which is served by
a privately drilled well (a relatively rare urban amenity). The irregular
supply and unreliable quality of city water infrastructure drives hundreds
of neighbors to visit the prostitute's well. This is a classic case of
horizontal integration, where market share or capitalization in one industry
allows a play for control of another. Seldom, though, does such a play
result in a prominent place in the public life of the community. The prostitute
is now an infrastructural node.
The "Prostitution in Nigeria"
entry in The World Sex Guide, a kind of Zagat's for the first-world
sexual tourist, suggests that the uninitiated Western tourist hire a guide
to take him to any of the universities. There, allegedly, he will have
his choice of women wishing to trade sex for cash or raybans "...the
best, most prettiest [sic] prostitutes are college students and if all
else fails, go to one of the colleges. They are not able to get part time
jobs while in school..." Public universities unintentionally provide
the essentials of the industry: impoverished young women, a relatively
secure (for the Western John) campus environment, and semi-private accommodation.
The total lack of enforcement of existing prostitution laws (except in
the North) causes suspicion as to the degree of "illicitness"
in this relationship, as the operation of this cottage industry is well-known
among students, due to the aggressive marketing campaigns of the competing
pimps.
Geography of Terror
Results of a citywide crime and crime-perception
survey bear out the picture of utter confusion over security in Lagos.
When asked for the "most dangerous" and "safest" areas
of the city, the same locations top both lists. In both cases, every single
geographic area was bested by the "d" response: "everywhere
is dangerous," or "nowhere is safe in Lagos."
The staggering complexity of this extended
crime scene suggests that, though the city is indeed a dangerous place,
the experiential map of the city that citizens use to judge relative safety
is totally unfounded. The suggestion of the survey data is that the term
"most dangerous" is applied to those areas the respondents are
most familiar with, a total reversal of similar surveys in American cities.
This familiarity or reputation is as often the result of media coverage
as personal knowledge, so that the perception of crime is actually a perception
of "mythologized" crime, in which particularly heinous acts
might be weighed more in the collective imagination. Confusion regarding
solutions is equally pervasive. As the survey shows, the statistical incidence
of home invasion, or armed robbery is significantly increased by the installation
of security measures on the home. Apparently the signification of possessions
worth protection outweighs the deterrent potential of the sometimes-elaborate
security solutions.
The picture of total insecurity is clear
on the roadside, where steel gates and concertina wire are sold retail
in every sector of the city. The brisk trade in bars, gates, wire and
barriers is also related to the establishment of officially sanctioned
"vigilante" groups, a kind of neighborhood watch, with broad
powers of law enforcement. The best-organized vigilantes, in Ikeja and
Yaba, have established training centers, giving citizen volunteers basic
training in law enforcement and street-fighting. In many neighborhoods
the groups have taken fundraising and project responsibility for the installation
of turnpikes and gates, locking down their section of public streets from
vehicular traffic after a locally-determined curfew.
Privatized Force
Nigeria was among the first testing grounds
for Private Military Corporations (PMC's), who were contracted by the
Federal government during the 1967 Biafran secession, with mixed success. The outsourcing of violence, or at least
military know-how, has become a popular, economical alternative for developing
nations, superpowers, and a few multinational corporations, whose capital
assets are valued at scales typically reserved for measures of national
output.
Coincident with the official privatization
of military-government assets, and the contraction of military personnel
requirements, is a period of rapid growth for the private security industry
in Lagos. The uniformed private guard has become a landscape fixture in
urban Nigeria, especially in Lagos Island and Ikoyi, where they flank
nearly every door to the street. The contraction of military personnel
is a stroke of fortune for the private landowner, who must compensate
for poor police coverage with private force, and informal survey confirms
that many of the guards are army veterans.
The range of services offered by the security
outfits varies widely, from cash-in-transit, executive protection and
travel escort, to more advanced event planning, provision of specialized
equipment, perimeter patrol and surveillance. The most valuable asset,
though, seems to be the simple uniform, conferring authority and association
with the military or police, the presence of a cluster of guards on the
sidewalk seems to be sufficient to signify the likely presence of a real
soldier with assault rifle inside. Though the guard services actually
offer little in the way of actual force, frequently being unarmed, they
seem to communicate that the proprietor is willing to spend on security.
The less formal security networks of the
city's markets and industrial sectors are highly developed, though frequently
invisible to the visitor. The non-uniformed (they are hardly "plain-clothed")
area boys of Alaba electronics market, the Ebute Metta sawmill area, Odunade,
and any other commercial street are a formidable, and informal incarnation
of the privatization of violence. Their activities in many cases parallel
those of formal police, but their more simple compensation and relative
lack of oversight results in an undivided loyalty and efficiency of tasking
that the formal security sector cannot compete with. At Alaba for example,
uniformed security personnel are part of the team, but only the most menial
tasks— those requiring recognition from a distance, such as traffic direction—are
left to them. The daily patrol, investigation, pursuit and prosecution
of criminals being left to the informal gang of youths associated with
the market chairman.
The quickness and efficiency of these neighborhood
gangs is blinding. Arriving on any commercial street or market area, the
apparent disorder of deliveries, disposition of goods, and bargaining
suggests that no authority is—or in fact could—be watching, but invariably
the outsider visiting such a location will be approached by a lookout,
typically a youth, before he can even exit his vehicle. The encounter
and initial interrogation by the youth delays the visitor in time to see
one of the more senior area boys, typically an extremely large man, who
interrogates further, and can then either wave the visitor past or refer
him to the authorities of the market association. The dragnet is swift
enough that, if he is available, the visitor can be in the office of the
Chairman, or of another official or businessman, within ten minutes, and
the service of the area boys goes both ways. Once interrogated and approved
for entry, the security team serves as a defensive escort through the
market, carrying the terrifying authority of the Chairman's office. Such
informal security networks may seem thuggish, but are by no means low-tech.
Offices in Alaba typically located behind storefronts which may or may
not be used for retail, are frequently equipped with concealed video surveillance
of the front office, for screening visitors to the big man
in the rear office. The area boys who patrol the Alaba storefronts to
deter or catch thieves carry modern stun guns to subdue offenders, and
the entire network is able to communicate by radio or cellular phone.
Uniforms
The appropriation of military standards
of authority and competence is accomplished thousands of times a day,
both by con artists and by otherwise legitimate businesses through the
use of counterfeit identification, (sometimes poorly) counterfeited military
vehicles, and illegally obtained uniforms. Slack enforcement of personal
identification and impersonation laws allows any citizen with a green
lorry, blue pickup or four yards of khaki cloth to join the lucrative
ranks of professional expediters. In more than one 419 case, operators
have even faked addresses by borrowing or renting suites in government
and private office buildings to conduct meetings.
Public Secret
Discerning national and urban security policy
and intentions is, in Nigeria, a dangerous pursuit. Despite highly publicized
breaches of public security, such as the 1999 OPC riots, and the open
street warfare precipitated this year by the introduction of Sharia government
insists on strict image control. Actually, the control over images of
"secret" sites and equipment has been lifted by the new democratic
government but lower-level soldiers and cadres are confused by the rules,
and have adopted a "better safe than sorry" approach. Thus photography
of any official police or military equipment is prohibited, and frequently
this prohibition extends to more mundane government agencies as well.
Since such a relatively large portion of the city—both public and private
spaces—is controlled or administered by military or police authorities,
this creates enormous gaps in documentation of conditions of the city
(whitespace).
Often, these rules suborn absurd Catch-22
situations. A new street atlas of Lagos State, based on aerial photography
of 1988-1989, has been produced, but awaits commercial release. The delay
in this five-year project is not due to information in the map itself,
which was carefully coordinated to omit military sites. The Federal Surveyor
General's Lagos Liaison Office selected a cover photograph, taken from
a downtown office building, and featuring the shining marina of Lagos
Island. Right-center of the image is an office building, abandoned at
the time of the snapshot, whose parking lot now serves as storage for
military vehicles. Though the picture illustrates nothing of the building's
plan (which is public record), and the picture could be retaken by any
of a thousand downtown offices, the printing of the map has been halted,
and the primary work-product of the Surveyor's last half-decade lies in
piles of color-separated proofs on his office-floor, awaiting approval
of a replacement cover. Interestingly, high-resolution aerial photographs
of the same building (and the military reservations that are omitted from
the map) are for sale in the same office for US$2.
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OTR Dispatches - March, 2004