Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos, stood at the podium in front of a Jumbotron projecting his face. It was 2013, and he was opening a ceremony for a small congregation of “who’s who” in Nigeria. Then-president Goodluck Jonathan, former US president Bill Clinton, and billionaires Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury looked on from a small audience, a flock of suit jackets and neck ties, kaftans, and caps. It was a celebration to mark the reclamation of 5,000,000 square meters of land from the ocean. On that land, a new city was promised to rise and become the future financial capital of Africa. It would be called Eko Atlantic.

The first time I laid eyes on Eko Atlantic was in a YouTube video. A rabbit hole of auto-play videos lead me to one that panned across a computer-generated skyline of high modernist skyscrapers, a cityscape unpopulated and placeless against an empty horizon. The narrator, British-accented and chipper, announced that Eko Atlantic was a privately-built city being constructed on the coast of Lagos, Nigeria. This new city would become a gateway to the continent and a “unique opportunity for investors to capitalize off huge developing growth,” according to the bodiless voice. It would have privatized roads and sewage, its own electric grid, and a sea wall designed to stop the threat of an eroding coastline, effectively reversing a century of natural history. To put it simply, Eko Atlantic would be a city of the future.

It was 2016 and I was living in Lagos. I lived on Victoria Island, a neighborhood known for big business, near the Mike Adenuga Towers which were tinny gold and outfitted with a statue of a bull in the plaza, giving the effect that the building was a double-exposed photograph of Trump Tower and Wall Street. Down the street from me was the Chinese consulate, where every day I’d walk by and see rows of Nigerians on benches outside, waiting to apply for visas. All Eko Atlantic was to me, at that time, was a logo and a long concrete wall at the edge of Victoria Island, separating me from what looked like miles of empty beach and naked steel frames, construction seemingly paused.

At the time, Nigeria was in the middle of a recession. I was advised to bring all my money into the country in crisp $100 bills, so I could exchange my cash on the black market. The banks followed the government’s arbitrary exchange rates and often ran out of cash at certain locations. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the private investigators for scams and corruption, graffitied properties across Lagos in their signature red all-caps: “EFCC UNDER INVESTIGATION.” Online, I’d read reports of the EFCC raiding luxury apartments whose walls were insulated with duffel bags full of American dollars. It seemed to me that Lagos was a city held together by cash, as if every building was literally made of money.

Gated communities jigsawed the whole city, creating a compendium of private borders to constantly negotiate. Phone calls, proof of invitation, and persuasion were often required to get you inside. But even outside of these walls, the city felt enclosed. A lagoon, Lagos is crisscrossed by water, dividing it into distinct social geographies like chambers of the heart. A cluster of islands in the southeast—Victoria, Lagos, Ikoyi—were accessible to the mainland via long, heavily trafficked bridges which slowly pumped commuters back and forth. To refer to the islands was to refer to business, to wealth, and to the city’s elites. It was precisely this group of people who attended that 2013 ceremony at Eko Atlantic.

In the video of that 2013 ceremony, Bill Clinton eventually took the stage and praised the Clinton Global Initiative-sponsored project, saying, “So, for every person who believed in this project, who believed in the future of the city, the state and the nation, I thank you. And I especially thank my friends Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury for making it happen and keeping their commitment. It is a commitment that will eventually not only help brand Nigeria as a country of the 21st century, but also show that it is affordable and profitable to live in harmony with this new natural reality.”

Covered by Business Insider and CNN’s Inside Africa, videos of Eko Atlantic told a congratulatory story: the state governors and billionaire Chagoury family had banded together to protect the coastline from erosion with a massive land reclamation effort that had now become “a city-building project on a global scale.” The Eko Atlantic channel provided a digital scrapbook of the project’s growth over the previous 10 years as it documented dredging, landfilling, and the construction of new buildings. But it always came back to those CGI images of the city, projecting an imaginary future where it was said Lagos would become the Dubai of Africa.

In the years since I first encountered Eko Atlantic on YouTube, it has become my white whale, a synecdoche for all the dynamics I’ve been trying to make sense of in Lagos. While it was hailed as an innovative solution to the problems facing the city—the lack of skilled jobs, the paucity of formal housing, and coastal erosion caused by climate change—private cities like Eko Atlantic are really a continuation of the status quo, bypassing democratic debate and concretizing urban inequality in the name of attracting investment. Yet these private cities continue to be symbolically powerful: though their urban imaginaries are created primarily for an audience of investors, the promises can resonate with working Africans too. The powers and processes sedimented beneath the clean facade of projects like Eko Atlantic give insight into cities like Lagos across the African continent, and tell us who claims control of the economic future.