Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, is the second-worst city to live in among 172 cities worldwide, a new report shows.
The revelation is according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in its 2022 ranking of the world’s most liveable cities. The city was ranked 171st of the 172 countries ranked by the EIU.
With a relatively low score of 32.2 per cent, Lagos was just a little above Syria’s war-torn capital, Damascus, and a place behind Libya’s Tripoli. Both cities are hotbeds of wars, conflicts and terrorism.
The other cities in the bottom 10 are Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, and Algiers in Algeria. Others are Port Moresby, Dhaka, Harare, Doula and Tehran, the capital of Iran.
“As in previous surveys, living conditions remain the worst in the bottom ten cities,” the report said, adding “Wars, conflicts and terrorism are the biggest factors weighing down the ten lowest-ranked cities, of which seven are from the Middle East and Africa.”
The report also noted that Vienna, Austria’s capital, is the most liveable city in the world, with Copenhagen, Calgary, Zurich and Vancouver rounding out the top five. The Austrian city rebounded to the top position with a score of 99.9 per cent, as in the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019, scoring highly on all five metrics: education, healthcare, culture and environment, stability and infrastructure.
“The top ten cities are also among those with few covid restrictions. Shops, restaurants and museums have reopened, as have schools, and pandemic-led hospitalisation has declined, leading to less stress on healthcare resources and services, and even the requirement to wear masks is no longer in force in most situations,” the report said.
Lagos scores low in all categories
Lagos scored very low in all the five metrics used to assess an individual’s lifestyle,
On the stability metric, Lagos scored 20 per cent, the same point as Damascus.
Under the healthcare category, the city scored 20.8 per cent, the same point it got last year.
For culture and environment, Lagos finished with 44.9 per cent while on education metric, the city scored 25 per cent.
Nigeria’s former capital maintained 46.4 per cent for the infrastructure category.
Same old record
Over the last five years, Lagos’ position remained largely at the bottom of the EIU liveability ranking.
In 2021, Nigeria’s largest city was ranked the second worst city to live in after Damascus.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the EIU did not release a liveability ranking in 2020.
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