Dubai in Nigeria – a brash new city being eased from the sea.

Silhouetted against a new, brash, Lagos skyline, off Victoria Island’s racing pulse, are a pair of new lofty condominium-style towers that make architectural nods to post- modernism and neo-futurism.

As part of a multi-billion dollar project that aims to transform one of Africa’s busiest commercial cities into a new economic capital and financial powerhouse, these stylish towers represent a mere microcosm of a wider blueprint.

From his vantage point, fringed by the Atlantic ocean to the south, Ronald Chagoury Jr, knows this blueprint well and can pick out the progress of the pillars of his colossal project, The ‘Eko Atlantic’ city.

As Vice Chairman of Eko Atlantic and South Energyx- the project’s planners and designers, rising towers signal the genesis of a visionary move to embark on one of the continent’s largest infrastructural projects.

An ambitious proposal it may have appeared, to build a brand new city on land clawed back from the ocean floor but Chagoury Jr is no novice in the murky waters of enterprise in Nigeria. South Energyx is a subsidiary of the Chagoury Group, a multinational business conglomerate with activity across multiple industries including manufacturing, construction, hospitality, telecommunications, transportation and international financing amongst others.

Starting out in the milling space with the production of flour and maize in the early 1970s, The Chagoury Group has over time, spread aggressively across the Nigerian market.

Decades later, founding partners, Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury Sir, two Nigerian-born industrialists of Lebanese descent have built a mammoth financial empire.

“Our core country of focus has been Nigeria”, Chagoury Jr says as we settle down for a chat at the Eko Pearl Towers on the emerging city’s site. A strong belief in the potential of the country has always been engrained in driving the group’s vision. We have gone through a lot of ups and downs throughout the history of the group. We have seen boom times, we have seen recessions but ultimately, we have also seen significant progress and today personally, I see immense potential in Nigeria.”

The grand vision for the Eko Atlantic city was born of a need to save Victoria Island – the commercial nerve centre of Lagos -from centuries of battering by the rising ocean.

“We thought of how it could possibly be a private investment that would relieve the financial pressure of such an issue on the government. We also thought of how we could turn the city into a financial centre for the region and ultimately, the continent”. Chagoury Jr says.

Citing the demographics, population size, growth rate and different income segments, the group knew the time was now. A growing middle-income group coupled with a growing population, meant great investment potential which led to a project proposal submission to the the Lagos State government to reclaim land from the Sea, which would, in turn, put a stop to the onslaught of coastal erosion.

To salve Lagos’ deepest recession in 30 years, the project also proposed a plan to create thousands of jobs and address a housing shortage in the face of a surging population.

According to recent U.N reports, Nigeria’s population is projected to cross the two hundred million mark by 2021 with great potential to double this size by 2050.

A seventeen million housing deficit, exacerbated by thin mortgage finance allowances, plagues the country. In Nigeria, the mortgage on the market represents about 0.8% of the country’s GDP in comparison to South Africa’s at about 25% of its GDP.  More government programmes alongside financial institution reviews are tackling the mortgage crisis today.

So, what is on offer? Nigeria’s most sustainable energy-efficient city and Africa’s largest marine engineering project spearheaded by industry behemoth, Royal Haskoning, spread across approximately 10 million square metres of reclaimed land that will combine commercial, residential, financial and touristic accommodations while also serving as a bulwark in the fight against the impacts of climate change at no cost to the taxpayers of Lagos.

“We worked very closely with the Lagos State government and it also became a free zone- a Federal government initiative which helped to enhance the idea of attracting businesses to Nigeria” Chagoury says.

The proposed solution called for the erection of what would become the project’s most challenging phase: ‘The Great Wall of Lagos’ – an 8-kilometre revetment to protect the Eko Atlantic city and low-lying Lagos from the force of the Atlantic Ocean.

The design and testing of a seawall, which could withstand the worst storms in a thousand years, was thus, tested to this effect.

It all began in July 2006.A concession agreement was signed between the Lagos State government and South Energyx Nigeria concretising what would represent one of the country’s biggest Public-private partnerships.  Commencement on The Great Wall of Lagos could begin.

Testing for the planned seawall ended in early 2009 and construction began shortly afterwards. Now about 9 metres above sea level, about 3 stories high, most of the great wall lies on the seabed between 7 and 11 metres under water.

As the great wall rose, so did resistance from some residents who questioned its long-term coastal erosion efficacy fearing adverse effects to wider parts of Lagos.

But in response to this, an international team of highly skilled coastal and marine engineers working with the Danish Hydraulic Institute in Copenhagen see zero cause for alarm citing a collection of huge amounts of data that form the basis for computer-generated and physical models showing nature’s interaction with harbour and coastal reclamation projects.

“2D tests were carried out to find out the most suitable cross section as different revetment cross sections were subjected to waves with significant heights of between 1 and 4 metres. Such wave conditions occur on anything from a monthly basis to once every hundred years. With this information, the team could start constructing the city’s revetment on a scale of 1 to 45. In the final test, the completed revetment survives the type of waves that only occur every hundred years without any sign of damage proving that the Eko Atlantic revetment is a completely safe structure and not even the type of storm we only see once every hundred years can affect the construction” says Fleming Schlutter, who handled physical models at DHI.

On initial challenges of erecting the wall, Chagoury recalls some turbulence “It was very rough fighting the Atlantic Ocean and often the very heavy equipment we had would be taken by the ocean. That was an initial technical bottleneck but we had to find a lot of in-house solutions to be able to deal with this”.

The project is well underway and Chagoury Jr couldn’t see it in better hands.