The clamour has started again. Politicians in Abuja are pushing for 31 new states, as if multiplying governors and assemblies is the key to progress. But Nigeria does not need more states. It needs cities of hope. What sounds like fairness and inclusion is, in reality, a costly illusion.
Every state comes with its own machinery: a governor’s mansion, a parliament, a judiciary, fleets of cars and aides. The bill for 31 of them? Roughly N6.2 trillion every year, according to projections published by the Yaba School of Thought (YSoT), a policy initiative supported by BusinessDay.
For a country where more than 80 percent of states already rely on federal allocations to pay salaries, the idea of carving out more is like borrowing to throw a bigger party while the roof leaks.
“The idea sounds attractive politically, but fiscally it is a non-starter,” said an Abuja-based economist, noting that Nigeria’s problem is not the number of states but “the weakness of their economic base.”
A tide that cannot be stopped
More than half of Nigerians now live in cities. In another 25 years, nearly four out of every five will. That means about 250 million people will be packed into urban areas by 2050, according to United Nations projections. The shift is already underway, and it will not be reversed.
This tide is not just villagers heading to Lagos. The main driver is natural increase: people in cities are living longer and having children. Towns once considered rural are now dense enough to be reclassified as urban, according to Urbanisation Research Nigeria (URN).
“Urbanisation is not simply people moving to Lagos,” the URN observed. “It is natural increase and densification that are driving the numbers.”
The four great belts of growth
Urban growth in Nigeria is multi-polar, spreading across four belts. In the north, the axis runs through Kano, Kaduna and Zaria. The Middle Belt corridor is centred on Abuja, stretching eastward through Keffi, Lafia and Jos.
In the south, two major belts dominate. The South-West megalopolis links Lagos with Abeokuta, Sagamu, Ibadan and Oyo, before extending further to Osogbo and Akure. Along the coast and inland, a southern arc runs from Benin City through Warri and Port Harcourt to Aba, Uyo and Calabar, with Onitsha, Enugu and Owerri forming the South-East inland cluster.
These belts ignore man-made boundaries. Built-up areas now spill across local councils and even state lines. Yet Nigeria still governs cities with fragmented councils that cannot coordinate drainage, transport or land use.
The World Bank has warned that this “fragmentation of authority” is leaving Nigerian cities “poorly equipped to respond to rapid growth.”
What happens when you ignore cities
If Nigeria keeps sprawling at the current pace, its urban land could grow fivefold by 2030, according to a study by the African Population and Health Research Center. Imagine the same number of pipes and power lines stretched five times further. That is the recipe for shortages, blackouts and rising inequality.
The effects are already visible. Middle-class estates are rising at city edges, behind gates and walls, while informal housing grows beside them without water, drainage or power.
“The gulf between formal and informal housing is widening,” said Mutiu Akinmade, an urban planner in Lagos. “We are building two different cities side by side.”
A lesson from China
In the late 1970s, Shenzhen was little more than a cluster of fishing villages across the border from Hong Kong, home to fewer than 300,000 people. When China declared it a Special Economic Zone in 1980, the city became a test bed for urban-led growth.
The results were staggering. By 2020, Shenzhen’s population had surged to 17.56 million, its GDP had climbed to about $429bn slightly below Nigeria’s economy at $432bn and it had become home to global giants such as Huawei, Tencent and BYD. By 2024, Shenzhen’s output was around ¥3.68trn ($511bn), compared with Nigeria’s rebased $244bn, according to data from CEIC.
The transformation was not built on new provinces or additional governors. It was built on deliberate urban planning, infrastructure investment and policies that attracted capital and talent. Shenzhen proves that cities, not borders, drive national transformation.
The lesson for Nigeria is straightforward. With the right investment, its cities could become hubs of innovation, manufacturing and services, just as Shenzhen rose from obscurity to global prominence in a generation.
And if Nigeria can lay fibre-optic cables across multiple states, delivering high-speed internet from Lagos to Kano, Abuja to Enugu then building new, functional cities should not be beyond reach. The technology already ignores state boundaries. Planning cities to do the same is a matter of vision, not impossibility.
The real alternative
The choice before Nigeria is stark. Spend trillions building 31 more states, or spend the same money building cities that actually work.
For roughly the same cost, one senior policy analyst at a Nigerian think-tank institute estimate, the country could build ten functional smart cities, one in each geopolitical zone, and still have funds left to upgrade the existing sprawl.
“Cities are where the growth happens,” said Vincent Nwanma, an expert. “They attract talent, investment and innovation. States consume; cities create.”
Lagos already shows both sides of the coin. It contributes about a fifth of national GDP, according to the Lagos Bureau of Statistics, yet it is also a case study in congestion and inadequate services. The lesson is clear: when cities function, they power the economy. When they fail, they choke it.
What a city-first plan looks like
The first step is to start where growth is already happening at the edges of cities. That is where housing is rising, legal or not. Serviced land with proper drainage, roads and water can stop chaos from taking root.
Fixing land markets comes next. Digitised registries and transparent compensation would let governments capture part of the surge in property values that follows new roads or water lines. According to the World Bank, land-value capture has financed up to 30 per cent of infrastructure in some Asian cities, a model Nigeria could adapt.
Transport is another urgent priority. Modern bus rapid transit in large metros, reliable intercity buses on main corridors, and safe, regulated minibuses in secondary cities would ease the daily burden on workers. “Every wasted hour in traffic is a hidden tax on productivity,” said Bisi Akinpelu, a transport consultant.
Governance must also scale up. Metropolitan authorities for Lagos–Ibadan, Kano–Kaduna, Abuja–Nasarawa and the South-East belt could coordinate planning across councils and states. “Cities are bigger than any single council,” a World Bank report noted. “They need institutions that match their footprint.”
Finally, inclusion has to be guaranteed. Every major project should reserve space for affordable housing, rentals and small businesses. Otherwise, the result risks becoming another Eko Atlantic, impressive but out of reach for most.
How to pay for it
The first step is to stop pouring money into new bureaucracies. The billions pencilled in for governors’ offices and assemblies in proposed states could lay water pipes, build schools and fund transit instead.
Smarter finance is within reach. Land-value capture can recycle the uplift in property prices created by public works. With tighter discipline, Nigeria’s largest cities could issue domestic municipal bonds, as South African metros do.
And with strong regulators, public–private partnerships could fund water plants, waste-to-energy projects and BRT systems without leaving the bill to future generations.
The harder choice
State creation remains politically seductive. It creates jobs for politicians, satisfies ethnic demands and gives the illusion of progress. But it does little to solve the reality of how 250 million Nigerians will live, work and move in cities by mid-century.
“The urban transition won’t wait for constitutional debates,” said Mutiu Akinmade, an urban planner. “Cities will keep growing whether we prepare for them or not.”
The bottom line
Nigeria’s prosperity will not be decided by how many flags are raised in new state capitals. It will be decided by whether its cities are livable, productive and competitive.
State creation offers symbols. Building cities offers substance. The countries that will thrive in Africa’s urban century will not be the ones that redraw their maps most often. They will be the ones that build places worth living in.
The real question for Nigeria is not whether it can create more states. It is whether it will build cities of hope, places worth living in.
