more pics @ HL.

http://happylagosian..com/2010/02/lagos-city-hall-is-back.html

what happens inside this hall - is it a shopping mall

blacksta:

what happens inside this hall - is it a shopping mall

where city council officials deliberate, also a civic center with reception halls for public, state and council functions.

It was built in 1965 for 1.5 mullion British pounds.

It's a damning indictment of the state of security in Lagos when every home, business, structure or facility must be fenced off like a prison in order to keep out miscreants. There was a time, when I was still quite young, we would walk from school and sit around the open plaza in front of city hall waiting for our parents to end work and take us home. It's commendable that the state has renovated the building, but I see despair when I look at pictures of Lagos with security fence surrounding every building. Public parks are fenced off. Shopping malls are fenced off. Even the police stations are walled off like prisons.

I see photographs of the state secretariat in Ikeja and how government has partitioned itself from the citizens for fear of armed robbers. I've been to many communities in the US and Europe and I have yet to see a seat of government that had a fence around it. The idea of a walled-off seat of government will be anathema to the American psyche. It does nothing but isolate government from the governed, symbolically.

Unfortunately, the walled fence has become regimented into the Nigerian psyche. There is nothing to celebrate here!

You are right, but we have different life experiences and way of life, We will get it together one day.

Pifa:

     
It's a damning indictment of the state of security in Lagos when every home, business, structure or facility must be fenced off like a prison in order to keep out miscreants. There was a time, when I was still quite young, we would walk from school and sit around the open plaza in front of city hall waiting for our parents to end work and take us home. It's commendable that the state has renovated the building, but I see despair when I look at pictures of Lagos with security fence surrounding every building. Public parks are fenced off. Shopping malls are fenced off. Even the police stations are walled off like prisons.

I see photographs of the state secretariat in Ikeja and how government has partitioned itself from the citizens for fear of armed robbers. I've been to many communities in the US and Europe and I have yet to see a seat of government that had a fence around it. The idea of a walled-off seat of government will be anathema to the American psyche. It does nothing but isolate government from the governed, symbolically.

Unfortunately, the walled fence has become regimented into the Nigerian psyche. There is nothing to celebrate here!
     

Good point. It wasn't long ago Lagos govt. demanded the removal of street gates. They should serve as a role model and eradicate gates from state properties.