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It's rush hour in Lagos — or rather, midway through the nine or so rush hours. Two battered taxi vans sputter to a halt on Victoria Island, the city's commercial hub, as one van accidentally taps the other. The drivers clamber out, peel off their shirts in the sticky heat, and pummel each other to the ground, while their 20 or so passengers stand behind, each rooting for their man. Finally, a police officer walks over, and wallops both drivers with a stick. The fight ends in a draw.

Such is life in Africa's megalopolis of about 15 million people. No one is sure how many cars there are in Lagos — the Governor's official count is 75,000, but the more reliable estimate is 1.4 million, from the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority. What no one disputes is the chaos. When morning traffic piles up on the Third Mainland Bridge connecting the relatively affluent islands to the sprawling poor neighborhoods, decorum yields to sheer survival. Drivers mount the curbs — which have withered into chunks of concrete through most of Lagos. Hundreds turn outbound lanes into inbound, muscling their way into reverse traffic.

Locals frequently boast about the tactics for coping. Traffic is to Lagos what real estate is to New York, and food to Paris: the compulsive topic of conversation. "If I leave exactly at 6.40 a.m. it takes me five minutes to get to work," says Pat Utomi, who heads the Center for Economic Alternatives at Lagos Business School, and has advised officials on how to salvage their city. "If I wait until 7.10. a.m., it takes one-and-a-half hours to travel less than one mile." By that same theory, I recently left my Victoria Island hotel at 5.30 p.m. to make a midnight flight to London. The driver of the 1982 Mercedes-Benz — "perfect for Lagos roads" — explained that leaving 20 minutes later would mean a four-hour slog to the airport, "and even then, you might not make the plane."

Africa has far graver problems than traffic, of course, and many of those are writ large in Lagos. Hundreds of thousands of residents are infected with HIV, and antiretroviral drugs remain scarce. Malaria strikes thousands more. There is a chronic water shortage, and virtually no sewage system; human waste is washed into Lagos Lagoon. There are perennial blackouts, and generators roar outside buildings day and night.

But Lagos's roads are its most visible sign of neglect, and an urgent economic issue. City officials warn that it threatens residents' mental health, and cuts into the city's productivity, since workers arrive at offices exhausted from four-hour commutes which begin at 4 a.m. Last month, a group of top American and European executives met President Olusegun Obasanjo in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, and told him Lagos needed a drastic overhaul, in order to lure more foreign businesses to the country. Now Lagos officials are vowing to revive plans for a mass-transit system, which was scrapped in the 1980s, after a military coup ousted the civilian government.

Nigeria is now in its sixth year of democracy, and earning billions of dollars in oil revenues. U.N. officials estimate that Lagos could be the world's third-biggest urban center by 2025. Yet Lagos State, whose governor is no friend of Obasanjo, remains strapped for cash. Its budget of $650 million is about one-twentieth that of New Delhi's, another third-world mega-city, and half of Johannesburg, with about one-quarter the population of Lagos. Built decades ago, Lagos's road system was created when it was not even Nigeria's biggest city, let alone a behemoth in sub-Saharan Africa.

Little wonder that residents are scrapping for a fight. Road rage is mounting, according to Ayodeji Oyedokun, general manager of the Lagos traffic authority, who says traffic control is high-risk job. "When we try to impound people, they want to hit you. That is why we always need security back-up from the police," he says.

There is no ticketing system for road violations. But two years ago, Oyedokun introduced a new scheme to try tackle the anarchy on the roads: Those who drive against the direction of the traffic are dispatched to psychiatrists for mental testing. "We have to find out if drivers are sane or not," says the traffic chief. So far, three of the 257 people tested have been declared psychologically unfit to drive.

Then again, some might say anyone who braves Lagos roads from behind the wheel puts their sanity in jeopardy.

• VIVIENNE WALT
• What can be done to speed up Lagos — the traffic chaos capital of West Africa?