By Kayode Bamisile

Abuja’s metro population has passed roughly four million people, up from under three million a decade ago, and it remains one of the fastest-growing capitals on the continent. New towers, new roads, and new commercial districts have followed that growth every year. What hasn’t kept pace is the supply of places worth spending an afternoon in.

That gap isn’t a planning footnote; it’s a measurable economic one. Cities that invest in sociable public spaces tend to see the businesses around that space perform better, not the other way around. Real estate development in Abuja and Lagos, however, tends to be discussed almost entirely in the language of planning, financing, land use, and feasibility. Those conversations are necessary. What they rarely settle is the question that actually determines whether a project succeeds: what makes people want to spend time in a place?

Developers are trained to measure success through investment value, occupancy rates, construction milestones, and financial returns. Those metrics matter, but the developments that create lasting value are usually the ones that become part of people’s lives. Places that people choose to visit repeatedly, recommend to friends, and eventually treat as part of the city’s identity. That is the difference between a development and a destination.

The best destinations encourage activity. They make room for families spending an afternoon together, friends meeting after work, children playing, people exercising, or someone sitting with no agenda at all. That is what placemaking means, and it is why African cities need to rethink how urban success gets defined.

Growth is usually measured in the visible register — taller buildings, wider roads, bigger commercial districts, expanding skylines. That growth is a real achievement, and Abuja’s has been dramatic: its urbanization rate has at times run as high as 8% a year, among the fastest of any city on the continent. But growth in infrastructure doesn’t automatically produce a city people enjoy living in.

Ask someone what they love most about a city they’ve lived in, and they rarely mention an office tower or a highway interchange. More often, it’s a waterfront, a public square, a park, or a neighborhood where they felt connected to the place around them. Those spaces don’t just improve quality of life — they strengthen a city’s economy, because in placemaking, people create value before buildings do. When people enjoy spending time somewhere, businesses follow. Restaurants succeed because there is already foot traffic. Events flourish because people already associate the location with experience. Retail performs because visitors choose to linger. Even the informal economy proves the point: the vendor, the photographer, the street musician who shows up without being invited by any masterplan is often the clearest signal that a place is working — clearer than any feasibility study.

This pattern isn’t unique to a specific location. Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront and Mombasa’s Mama Ngina Waterfront both took underused harbor land and turned it into public-facing destinations first. Their eventual growth into commercial engines came after. The V&A now draws around 25 million visits a year and supports more than 83,000 direct and indirect jobs, contributing over R45 billion to the local economy annually. Mama Ngina Waterfront is a much smaller, publicly funded example of the same principle: a roughly 460-million-shilling renovation of a public promenade that turned a neglected stretch of coastline into one of Mombasa’s most visited public spaces.

In both cases, the tourism and retail economy that followed depended on the public space, having already earned the city’s affection. The lesson generalises: development doesn’t create the reason people gather. It gives shape to an instinct that’s already there.

That principle sits at the center of Jabi, the destination Akida Hills is developing on a 3.36-hectare site within the wider 14-hectare Jabi Lake waterfront district in Abuja.

Long before anyone talked about waterfront development, people were already finding reasons to be at Jabi Lake. Despite remaining largely undeveloped, the lake already draws thousands of visitors a year on the strength of its setting alone. The role of our development, in that context, isn’t to manufacture what nature has already provided. It’s to respect it, improve access to it, and build experiences that enhance it rather than compete with it. That is the thinking behind the project’s design: walkways, viewing decks, and promenades intended to increase visitor influx and give people a reason to linger longer.

Phase one, scheduled to open in December 2026, will introduce dining and leisure experiences, water-based activities, structured weekly programming, a seasonal lights festival, and a dancing musical fountain — the first of its kind in West Africa — as the destination’s signature evening attraction. Those elements matter, but they are not the reason the project exists. If the destination becomes a place people choose to visit because it adds something to everyday life in Abuja, commercial success will follow as a consequence of that.

The stakes for getting this right go beyond any single project. Nigeria’s Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Creative Economy projects that the tourism sector could generate trillions of naira and create millions of jobs within eight years as part of the federal government’s tourism strategy for Abuja and its surrounding districts. With national unemployment estimated at around 4.3%, youth unemployment closer to 6.5%, and underemployment around 9.2%, destinations that can absorb workers in hospitality, entertainment, and related services are one of the more direct paths available to job creation in the sector.

Sustainability cannot be an afterthought in developments like this. When a project is built around a natural asset, the environment isn’t simply part of the view; it’s the reason the development has value in the first place. A lake should never become a backdrop to a project; it should remain one of its defining priorities. Building beside a living ecosystem comes with real tension, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What matters is whether we deal with that tension early, while we’re still designing, or whether we ignore it and just talk about sustainability later, after the fact, as a marketing line. That’s the difference between actually caring about this land and just using it to sell the project.

The future of African cities will not be decided by who builds the tallest towers or delivers the largest developments. It will be shaped by the cities that invest in public space alongside infrastructure, that treat leisure as an economic driver rather than a luxury, and that build destinations people return to because they want to. Whether in Abuja, Lagos, Accra, or Nairobi, the next generation of successful cities will belong to the ones built with people, not just projects, in mind.

*Bamisile is the Founder, Akida Hills