THE WORLD IN 2013 | Huddled masses

Today, I was reading various articles on "the economist" and I was amazed of what Africa in 2013 is going to be.. So i though of sharing with my pageviews to togetherly realize the huge role WE have to play as African Youths..

Africa’s cities take centre stage

Sometime in 2013, whether by a birth in the Makoko slum or a job-seeking migrant stepping off a minibus at the motor-park, Lagos will overtake Cairo to become Africa’s largest city. This is confirmation of a decisive shift in Africa away from the ends of the continent and towards its tropical middle. The world has long looked at Cairo, Johannesburg and Cape Town as Africa’s heavyweight cities. This will still make sense economically—their combined GDP is greater than all of eastern and central Africa—but in planning for what comes next, the tropics are where the numbers and opportunities are going to be. Within a decade Lagos will have 16m people; Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, will have 15m.

Booming cities will be good for Africa’s construction sector. Ambitious new city projects like EkoAtlantic in Lagos and Tatu City in Nairobi will be welcomed by a middle class tired of traffic jams, power cuts and insecurity. Such projects are likely to make money, but they will contribute little to giving the poor a sense of ownership of their cities. It is unclear how jobs will be created in cities that have little industry. Innovative services on African mobile phones will win praise in Silicon Valley in 2013, but software can do only so much. Look down the list of growing cities and a host of little-known places like Huambo, Mbuji-Mayi and Mbeya will be expected to serve populations the size of Milan’s—with little infrastructure.

“Within a decade Lagos will have 16m people”

The standard view of cities as generators of wealth, diversity and ideas will be challenged in Africa. The exclusion of the poor will be magnified by a lack of public space and by rising living costs. To become livable, cities will have to improve public transport. Many are trying, but safety will be a challenge: murder, and violent carjacking and robberies, will rise in many cities in 2013, sometimes with police involvement.

Over half of all city-dwellers will be under 18 and every African election in 2013 will be decided, statistically at least, by first-time voters. What will they want? Opportunity, obviously. Beyond that, no one knows. Will young people who have grown up in cities hark back to the countryside, to tribal cultures and languages, or will they forge an urban identity, infused with Pentecostalism or Islam, rap, English Premier League football, and much else besides? What will constitute collective memory in communities without a history?

What is certain is that African cities will be the most informal economies in the world in 2013. Some 70% of workers will live on their wits, relying on day labour to make enough to eat, pay rent and send their children to school. That will make cities dynamic and mobile, but also combustible. Nairobi’s slums exploded into violence following disputed elections in 2008 and could rise up again after new elections in the coming year. What will become clearer in 2013 is that more equitable African cities, communities which harness high-tech to labour-intensive low-tech (rickshaws, not trams), will have a rich future, including in the preservation of biodiversity—a selling-point of cities. Conversely, a failure to create jobs for the growing urban masses will risk disorder.

Jonathan Ledgard: fellow, future Africa, EPFL; east Africa correspondent, The Economist