L
agos traffic is so snarled and
gridlocked that a recent trip
from the airport to Ajah, on
Lagos Island — a journey short-
er than 50 kilometers — took me eight
hours. That was two hours longer than
my flight from Istanbul to Nigeria.
Welcome to traffic and travel La-
gos-style, where the roads are clogged
and millions of commuters are choked
with frustration about the daily hassle in
Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s
fifth largest economy.
Disgruntled commuter Yinka Ogun-
nubi is a typical example, recently tweet-
ing: “Left my house by 5:30 a.m., got to
work at 9:10 a.m. This is no longer work,
it is suffer-head. Dear Boss, Can I work
from home?”
Although many in Nigeria find the
city alluring, especially for economic
reasons, living in Lagos, the third most
stressful city in the world, can take a
mental toll.
The world’s least stressful cities in 2017:
A new study by UK-based company
Zipjet has revealed the world’s most and
least stressful cities, according to factors
including finance, transport, percentage
of green spaces and citizens’ wellbeing.
Hamburg was the ninth least stressful
city to live in, out of 150 cities included
in the study.
The city is unhealthily crowded. De-
spite being the smallest state in the
country, it has the highest urban popula-
tion with an estimated population of 22
million people and counting, more than
double New York or London’s tally.
More than eight million people, mov-
ing in five million vehicles cram into a
tiny network of just 9,100 roads every
day. This is the reason why Lagosians
spend an average of 30 hours in traffic
each week — or 1,560 annually — while
drivers in Los Angeles and Moscow traf-
fic spent only 128 and 210 hours respec-
tively in the whole of 2018.
Lagos is projected to become the
world’s biggest city by 2100, with a pop-
ulation of 88.3 million. It urgently needs
better road facilities and a high-capacity
transit system.
Mental health and productivity dis-
asters
Traffic congestion, with its noise and
environmental pollution, takes a huge
toll on workers’ mental and physical
health. Health professionals have even
linked its overall damage to the increasing
rate of suicide in the city.
According to consultant psychiatrist
Olufemi Oluwatayo, it’s not a surprise that
Lagos commuters are negatively impacted
by the traffic conditions.
“It is not really hard to see why employees
might feel stressed, burned out or exhaust-
ed, especially in a city like Lagos,” Olu-
watayo says.
“They leave home at 4 a.m., enduring
hellish traffic and then [have] to deal with
work pressure and the prevalent job insecu-
rity, not to add individual family problems
and responsibilities. It is no surprise that, in
general, many more people seems to be suf-
fering from anxiety and depression.”
The situation is also killing work-
force productivity.
“How productive can you be when you
stay in traffic for over six hours on a daily
basis, conjoined with the things you go
through to have a normal life in this city?”
media exec Agnes Marquis said in a report
by local media publication Pulse, titled
“Here’s why you should think twice before
taking a job in Lagos.”
‘Beyond the cubicle’
While working conditions across the
globe are fast evolving, some Nigerian com-
panies are reluctant to enable their employ-
ees to work from home. However workers
with the option to decide when, where and
how they work perform better, according
to a report in the Harvard Business Review.
Companies in Lagos who have enabled
their teams to work from home say they
rely on Internet tools such as Slack and
ClickMeeting to foster communications
remotely.
“We heavily leverage Slack for internal
communication — this makes it very easy
for people to be in the loop of whatever
is going on in the company regardless of
where in the world they’re working from,”
says Abdulrahman Jogbojogbo, who works
for financial company Paystack.
Traffic jam stifles both state and national
economies. The Lagos business community
alone loses $30.5 million monthly. While
the gridlock at Nigeria’s largest seaport,
Apapa, costs the country $19 billion annu-
ally — a loss higher than the country’s 2016
budget.
The state’s new governor Babajide San-
wo-Olu has promised to tackle the traffic
issues and also decongest the Apapa port
area, but some say his changes need to
go deeper as the city creaks under the
weight of its vast population.
