The secondary city is defined above all by what it is not: neither a metropolis nor a rural town. The Tunisian city of Gabès and its Nigerian counterpart Ibadan are both considered secondary cities, even though one has 176,000 inhabitants and the other 2.8 million.

As difficult as they may be to define, secondary cities play a vital role; they are a sign of democratic stability and guarantee of harmonious geographical development.

Between 12.5% and 15% of Africans live in these urban areas, according to Brian H. Roberts, professor emeritus at the University of Canberra, and Godfrey Anyumba, associate professor at the University of Venda in South Africa, who were commissioned by the African Development Bank (AfDB) to produce a report on the subject

By 2050, an additional 900 million people will be living in African cities, completing the continent’s demographic transition, and most of these new urbanites will live in secondary cities.

Yet these are places that remain under the radar of economic and political policies. Nine African metropolises attract more than half of all foreign direct investment (FDI), led by the behemoths of Cairo and Johannesburg. In the latter, the ‘corridors of freedom”’ – immense interconnected arteries – are intended to link the former townships to create a megalopolis of 12 million inhabitants, close to the South African capital Pretoria, 65km away.

On the front line

Global warming has enabled the rural world to make its voice heard, at last, by decision-makers, with an increasing number of projects and incentives to combat soil erosion and the advancing desert, among other concerns. However, little or nothing is being done in this vein for secondary cities, regardless of the fact that they are on the front line when disaster strikes.

Their residents, for example, were the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic: the major metropolises monopolised the vaccines, while sparsely populated areas were proportionately less affected.

Secondary cities also suffer chronically from a lack of salaried jobs, particularly in the higher services sector. Commercially, the metropolises leave them with only semi-wholesale and retail services.

The decision-makers don’t want to help the secondary cities to emancipate themselves, because that would mean changing the balance of the country.

In Mombasa, Kenya, considered by AfDB one of the most important secondary cities on the continent, wholesale trade is eight times less important than in Nairobi.

“Africa’s secondary cities remain under-exploited due to under-investment in urban infrastructure. They rank low in central governments’ priorities for infrastructure funding and budget allocations,” says the report titled ‘The Dynamics of Systems of Secondary Cities in Africa: Urbanisation, Migration and Development’, published in 2022.

They will find it difficult to become competitive and efficient, unless investment funds and money invested in infrastructure increase considerably. If nothing changes, social unrest – regional disparity was one of the causes of the Tunisian Revolution in 2011 – and the explosion of the ecological time bomb is a virtual certainty.

Access to foreign currency

Secondary towns do not have the economic advantages of metropolises, but most have the population and the market to become competitive. Researchers have mapped out three main types of possible development patterns.

The first includes areas that are economically attractive for export, such as Tangierwith its deepwater port or Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar, or, as is the case with Luxor in Egypt, for their ability to attract tourists. These cities have rapid growth potential because they have direct access to foreign currency.

But they are also fragile. A new pandemic, an attack or a global crisis, however temporary, could bring their activity to a screeching halt.

Their second possibility is to be the centre of a regional cluster. In this case, secondary cities attract labour from neighbouring rural areas. They then become a centre of activity for both local and national markets.

They can even create a new geographical and economic space, by gathering around them towns and villages outside their traditional sphere of influence. “The intention is to develop something like an ‘internet of cities’ to maximise choice in access to goods and services and export markets,” says the AfDB report.

The Nigerian city of Ibadan is a perfect example. From a small commercial town, Ibadan has become a centre of attraction since the arrival of the train linking it to Lagos. Demographics and businesses have grown hand in hand.

Ibadan’s economy is growing at a rate of 11% a year, with more than a million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Like all secondary cities, Ibadan is involved in both agriculture (8.6% of the national economy in this sector) and the tertiary sector – Ibadan accounts for 11.5% of the Nigerian economy in the information and communications sector.

But this growth has been achieved without an urban plan. Hardly more than half the population has access to electricity in the new outlying districts. The failure to anticipate the development of these regional centres is now jeopardising the living conditions, and therefore the health, of their inhabitants. In Mombasa, Kenya, a quarter of workers are in the informal sector, and 60% of the 1.3 million inhabitants live in shanty towns.

Mixed results

“The decision-makers don’t want to help the secondary cities to emancipate themselves, because that would mean changing the balance of the country. These towns are run by political and ethnic clans and so on. The authorities have no interest in seeing these potential rivals gain power,” says Jérôme Chenal, a lecturer and researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

The urban planner criticises the lack of willingness to decentralise, which he observed during missions to draw up master plans in French-speaking Africa. “At best, it was the deconcentration of public services. However, there needs to be a rebalancing, otherwise the urban giants that are the capitals will continue to grow until they become unmanageable,” he says.

In 2017, Côte d’Ivoire took a step in this direction by setting up an Infrastructure Project for Urban Development and the Competitiveness of Secondary Urban Areas (Piducas) for the towns of Bouaké and San Pedro, co-financed by the World Bank. Six years on, the results are mixed.

The project was due to end in the summer of 2022, but has been extended by a year, not just as a result of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, but because of governance that is judged to be only ‘moderately’ effective by the World Bank.

A digital platform and an app to interconnect farmers and cooperatives have been developed. On the other hand, major roadworks, including the A3 road to open up Bouaké in the centre of the country, have barely been completed. Initially, Piducas also planned to create 100 businesses in Bouaké and San Pedro, but this figure has been reduced to 30.

A better quality of life

The third development strategy for secondary cities is to join the sphere of influence of the metropolis without being swallowed up by it. Given the size of its territory, Ghana cannot multiply the number of urban centres.

Located 150km from the capital, Cape Coast does not have the resources to compete with Accra, whose per capita income is 2.8 times higher. But the coastal city has what it takes to be a viable secondary city.

According to the 2010 census, 15% of the city’s new residents came from Greater Accra. These new inhabitants choose to leave the capital for a better quality of life, without having to give up the services available in big cities. Three-quarters of the workforce is in the service sector, mainly in education, catering and health.

As long as the prosperity of secondary cities is not fully addressed by the authorities through urban planning and efficient decentralisation, they will remain on the sidelines.

On the other hand, Cape Coast attracts many non-resident commuters, who return to their small towns or villages in the surrounding area in the evenings. The city has become a bridge between the countryside and the Ghanaian metropolis.

These three categories are not exhaustive. Many cities have developed into secondary cities for specific geographical, historical or religious reasons. One example is Touba-Mbacké, in central Senegal.

In the hands of the Sufis, the town of nearly a million inhabitants has developed thanks to a religious pilgrimage. The Touba area even enjoys extra-territorial status, which allows religious leaders to ban certain practices (sport, alcohol, cinema) that are found in Mbacké, its sister city. The involvement of local residents in local life, through religious associations, has been a major asset for the development of Touba.

The Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa draws both its strength and weakness from its diversity. Composed almost equally of Oromo and Somali ethnic groups, it was for a long time the focus of political confrontation before a way to co-exist was established. Power is shared according to ethnic weight: 40% for the Oromo representatives, 40% for the pro-Somali parties, and 20% for the others. This precarious balance allows the border town to trade with Djibouti and Somalia, but prevents massive investment.

The current trend is also to build new towns close to capital cities to relieve congestion: Yennenga, 15km south of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso; Sèmè City, a ‘start-up town’ 40km from Cotonou in Benin; or Kpomé, 35km from Togo’s capital Lomé.

“From a technical point of view, starting from scratch is undoubtedly simpler than rehabilitating secondary cities. But it requires more resources, and in contexts where resources are lacking, these are projects that are virtually impossible to support,” says researcher Chenal.

As long as the prosperity of secondary cities is not fully addressed by the authorities through urban planning and efficient decentralisation, they will remain on the sidelines.

Rwanda is a good example of this. Supported by the World Bank, the Great Lakes country has developed a green development policy for six pilot secondary cities – Huye, Musanze, Nyagatare, Rubavu, Rusizi and Muhanga.

The key to realising the potential of such cities is to improve the capacity of local and national authorities to manage urbanisation and make full use of infrastructure, capital, human resources and technology.

‘The mistake would be to pit major cities against second cities’

“Equity is an essential element in public policy decision-making,” says Sami Yassine Turki, associate professor at the Higher Institute of Environmental Technologies, Urbanism and Construction in Tunis.

“The mistake would be to pit major cities against secondary cities. If the state focuses solely on the capital as an economic lever, it won’t work. That said, we must also avoid spreading scarce resources over an infinite number of towns. We have to think in terms of the territory”.

Provided it’s not already too late. Tunis has all but killed off Gabès and the surrounding region by relying on phosphate mining to bring in foreign currency. This city, with its effective infrastructure, had everything it needed to become a major regional centre, but it is in decline due to pollution and a mining sector that has run out of steam.

Air pollution and discharges of phosphogypsum into the sea have taken their toll on one of the world’s rare maritime oases. Now, no one dares visit the beaches of Gabès, once a popular holiday destination. The city must therefore reinvent itself, because the decision-makers in Tunis decided it was doomed to sacrifice itself to the phosphate industry.

As far as funding is concerned, secondary cities will always need help from the state, but there are an increasing number of solutions to diversify or augment their budgets.

Using local chiefs to collect property taxes has enabled the town of Kananga in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to increase its revenue by 43%. Tanzania has introduced a digitisation system based on geographical position to improve the collection of local taxes.

Bizerte, Tunisia’s sixth-largest city, borrowed on the capital market in 2020 so that it would no longer be dependent on Tunis and its drip-feed financing: by 2021, municipal financing represented barely 2.75% of the State budget.

There are solutions to the problems of rapid urbanisation and poor governance in Africa’s secondary towns. Some of them are already being implemented.

The African School for the Professions of Architecture and Urbanism in Lomé offers a Masters in the development of secondary cities. However, this new urban age that is taking shape requires a rapid change of course. Are the metropolises of Africa’s 54 countries ready to share their wealth?