Lagos poet "AJ" Daga Tola is also a musician and activist who lives in some of the worst urban conditions on earth. The main road to his eight foot square shack in Ajegunle slum is ankle-high in litter. The open drain down his alley overflows with black sewage. Fires smoulder below the nearby motorway bridge; armies of hawkers sell water on the permanently jammed expressway; and burned-out lorries and cars are dumped on either side of the road.
"Everyone here wakes up in anger," says the man who has taken the initial letters of the slum as his first name. "The frustration of being alive in a society like this is excruciating. People find it very hard and it is getting worse. Day in, day out, poor people from all over Africa arrive in this place, still seeing Lagos as the land of opportunity. They are met at the bus stops by gangs of youths who demand payments. There is extortion at every point. Only one in 10 people have regular work."
Roughly one million people live in Ajegunle - known in Lagos as "Jungle City" - which is just one of many dozens of chaotic slum areas across the mega-city that now stretches over roughly 300 square kilometres with a population density greater than either Mumbai or Calcutta. Some, like Makoko, are built partly on water with families eking out a precarious and unhealthy existence in shacks balanced on stilts. All are dangerous, volatile and unhealthy.
Out of Ajegunle have come some of Nigeria's most famous footballers, such as former international Samson Siasia and hip hop idols such as Daddy Showkey and Mighty Mouse, but there are few success stories; the main growth businesses in the ghetto, says AJ, are gangs and evangelical churches which promise a better life.
African urbanisation has lead to extraordinary new energy in the arts and culture, but it comes with an horrific social and environmental price tag. "The reality is that people must share rooms with 10 others," says AJ. "They have no rights as tenants. They have no ventilation, so they get ill. The drains do not work. It is abnormal to have electricity. They can go days, even weeks without power. Only the rich have water and if the poor get access to any, they must pay 10 times as much for it. The roofs leak. In the rainy season you cannot move because of the flooding. Governance has failed us on every level. The local, the state and the federal governments have all done nothing for us."
At the other end of the Lagos spectrum is the state governor, Dr Tasiwaju Tinubu. Lagos is no longer the federal cap ital, but it is still the commercial, cultural and trading centre of West Africa, providing most of Nigeria's taxes and revenue. If Lagos were an economy, it would be larger than 32 other African countries.
"You can see what is happening ... the city is collapsing," Dr Tinubu says. "By 2010 we are expected by the UN to be the third largest city in the world. Our population is already 15 million and could reach 24 million by 2010. Lagos is the fastest growing mega-city in the world - 6% a year."
In truth no one really knows Lagos's population. But local research suggests 300,000 people a year are flooding in. "People come here to beg from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Togo, the Horn of Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, Chad, Niger ... everywhere. Yet we have nowhere to put them, and we are running to catch up with ourselves. And the more is done to improve the city, the more they come."
Dr Tinubu, a US-trained accountant formerly with Exxon Mobil and Arthur Anderson, has pledged to fight corruption, improve the water, clean up the waste and tackle the transport problem. But he is upsetting powerful vested interests which, he says, have been looting the city for decades. He now tells only a handful of people where he intends to spend the night and travels in a convoy of 15 black Mercedes SUVs, with bodyguards, advisers, armed police and ministers. In the five years since he was elected, there have been three serious attempts on his life.
Lagos, which boasts 60% of Nigeria's non-oil economy, is being penalised, he says, because federal government hates the fact he is not a member of the president's ruling party. It has, he said, withheld 200 billion naira [£78m] from the city, and is diverting other money away.
"We provide 65% of all the VAT in Nigeria, yet Lagos gets only 15% of it. There is only about $3-400m (up to £200m) a year to spend on the city. That is for 15 million people - about $2 per person per year. What can I do for this?"
His budget is dwarfed by other comparable world cities such as Delhi, (population 13.8 million) which has a budget of $2.6bn; and Jakarta (11 million) which has $1bn. Lagos, says the governor, has been abandoned by the world community. "We are paying the price of General Abacha and other corrupt leaders and businessmen. We have to convince people that Lagos is no longer run by corrupt people."
According to the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido) about $107bn of Nigerian money is held in private accounts in Europe and the US. Nigeria's foreign debt is $35bn and, says the World Bank, it is now poorer in terms of income levels than Bangladesh.
But the west is also responsible, says Dr Tinubu, by insisting its meagre aid to Nigeria goes through central government. "Where you have over-centralisation, as here, you have corruption," he says. He says the rhetoric from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, the Africa Commission, the World Bank and G8 leaders about helping Africa is in reality not very helpful. "All the noise from Bush and Blair about democracy and freedom is not backed by concrete action in developing countries," he says. "The World Bank? They offer us 200 buses. We need 4,000."
"Lagos is growing at an alarming rate and it deserves a donor presence," says William Kingsmill, Britain's Department for International Development head in Nigeria. "The international community needs to get real. Nigeria is getting next to no aid, yet is the largest country in Africa. Some OECD countries think because it has oil it is rich. It is desperately poor. But governments are nervous about working there. Nigeria has a track record of massive corruption. Debt relief is essential. It has paid its debts twice over and still owes £35bn. We want to work with state governments like Lagos."
The city is on the point of declining even further, says Peter Ojumu, director of local group Health Matters which works in many deprived areas. "The dreadful environment is linked directly to escalating health problems. Malaria, typhoid and TB, as well as sexually transmitted diseases, are all much more common now. Families must spend more on health so people are becoming poorer. The communities are worse off, so desperation and corruption grows.
"It needs massive investment in the infrastructure but also reform of the political system. Good people are not coming forward because politics is only for the rich, and for anyone to be elected needs people to be bankrolled - which means people have to be paid back and this leads to corruption. The same kind of people always rule us. They just change their uniforms."
Top priority for many communities is water and sanitation. Only 30% of the city has access to safe water, says Olumuyiwa Coker, head of the newly privatised Lagos Water Corporation. "Four years ago [when I took office] I needed armed guards, too. They attacked me with voodoo and death threats. There was institutional, high-level corruption."
Mr Coker, also a western educated accountant, says he was staggered by what he found. "More than 80% of the water was being stolen. No one knows what happened to a $170m World Bank loan to improve the system. Only 4% of the revenue was being collected."
But he was appalled by the International Finance Corporation, the private lending arm of the World Bank, which urged Lagos to adopt a privatisation model that had failed around the world and, says Mr Coker, would have bankrupted the city. "We came up with our model tailored to our needs."
The company is now collecting 30% of its revenues, and is solvent, but Mr Coker needs up to $2.5bn to get his planned 80-90% water coverage in the city. It will only come, he says, from a mix of private sector, state government and the capital market. "But (unlike other water privatisations) I do not expect the price to rise, I do not expect redundancies and the rich will pay more than the poor. It is our own model," he says.
For the communities in Lagos, it cannot come too soon. "Being constantly ignored and rejected is sometimes worse even than poverty itself," says Victor Omoshenin, an ActionAid community worker who lives and works in Ajeromi village slum. The only recognition that his community have had in the past year was when the authorities came in to destroy hundreds of shanty houses without notice or compensation. "They have not got rid of the problem. Most people just became homeless," says Mr Omoshenin.
"A few years ago this community was really dangerous. There was a high risk of stabbings, teenage pregnancies, fights, Aids. A lot of girls died from abortions done by the local chemist. But we started an education programme, set up a community clinic, listened to people and trained them to help themselves. In a few years it has improved a lot here. Anything is possible in Lagos."
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