The young man with the crowbar stood on a heap of
rubble — planks, pallets, remains of pots, bits of cardboard, wisps of
clothing, chunks of concrete — indistinguishable from every other pile in a
field of debris stretching far into the distance.
“This is
the home I am staying in before Fashola demolished it,” said John Momoh, 28,
looking down at the pile, referring to the governor of Lagos, Babatunde
Fashola. Mr. Momoh, a driver, searched doggedly for anything salvageable — a
nail, a board — in the mess.
Government backhoes came in and plowed through
Mr. Momoh’s simple wooden dwelling and some 500 like it last Saturday,
instantly making homeless perhaps 10,000 of Lagos’s poorest residents and
destroying a decades-old slum, Badia East. For days, residents wandered the
chaotic rubble-strewn field, near prime Lagos real estate.
They were dazed and angry. Small children slept
on the muddy ground. Men climbed the mounds of rubble, searching. In intense
heat, women, men and children said they were hungry and sleeping outside. The
government had destroyed their present, they said, without making any provision
for their future.
“I lost everything,” Mr. Momoh said. “We are
trying to bring out some sticks, to look for our daily bread,” he said, poking
the rubble. “We don’t have money to eat.”
A 30-year-old cook, Kingsley Saviouru, said:
“They demolished everything. They didn’t give us anything. We are here,
suffering.”
Under Lagos’s energetic governor, much lauded in
the international financial media, this crowded megalopolis of high rises,
filthy lagoons, fierce traffic jams and sprawling slums, home to perhaps 21
million people, has proclaimed its ambition to become the region’s, if not
Africa’s, premier business center.
Infrastructure and housing projects abound,
including a light-rail network whose trestles already vault crowded
neighborhoods, and a vast upmarket Dubai-style shopping and housing development
built out into the Atlantic Ocean, inaugurated last week by former President Bill Clinton. A new Porsche dealership has
opened in the financial district.
In this gleaming vision, the old Lagos of slums
has an uncertain future. Two-thirds of the city’s residents live in “informal”
neighborhoods, as activists call them, while more than one million of the
city’s poor have been forcibly ejected from their homes in largely unannounced,
government slum clearances over the last 15 years, a leading activist group
says.
Last summer, there was a brief outcry when
government speedboats bearing machete-carrying men cleared out the floating
neighborhood of Makoko, making some 30,000 people homeless. At the vast city
dump at Ojota, where thousands eke out a living, shacks are cleared out
frequently, residents complained.
The Nigerian government’s untender approach to
its poor, who account for at least 70 percent of the population, was again on
full display last Saturday at Badia East, where even more demolition — another
40,000 live there — is now threatened. The scene Saturday was classic: a black
police vehicle pulled up early, armed, uniformed policemen sprang out to quell
any restiveness, and the backhoes went to work under the eyes of dismayed
residents, slashing through thin wood and concrete block.
Street toughs — called “Area Boys” in Lagos, and
often employed by the state government’s demolition squad for around $10
dollars, activists said — got busy where the backhoes could not penetrate,
smashing flimsy structures with sledgehammers and, Mr. Momoh and others said,
stealing residents’ possessions.
Many said they were given 20 minutes, at most, to
pack up their belongings.
“Everybody was running helter-skelter,” said a
resident, Femi Aiyenuro, adding that those who went back in to retrieve
possessions risked being beaten with rifle butts and batons. “They started
beating people.”
What little that could be salvaged was piled
along a railway line running along Badia’s edge.
“They were flogging me,” said Charity Julius, 27
and pregnant. She said she ran into her dwelling to fetch her baby boy, and
once he was safely out, she ran back to gather as many possessions as she
could. The police did not like that and beat her, she said, showing a bruise on
her right arm as evidence.
The Lagos state commissioner for housing, Adedeji
Olatubosun Jeje, provided a different version of events.
“It’s a regeneration of a slum,” he said. “We
gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing
units. What we removed was just shanties. Nobody was even living in those
shanties. Maybe we had a couple of squatters living there.”
As for the new housing, “there’s not a chance
they can afford it,” said Felix Morka, executive director of the Social and
Economic Rights Action Center, adding that Badia residents earn under $100 a
month on average. The World Bank had previously included Badia on a
list of slum communities for upgrade, Mr. Morka noted.
That list is now moot. Within six hours, Badia
East was gone.
“We don’t have anywhere to stay,” said Joy
Austin, a mother of three. “Everybody is outside now. We don’t have anywhere to
go.”
Her sleeping accommodation is now a filthy foam
mattress placed on cardboard, in the mud; her children sleep under low torn
mosquito nets.
A wig pokes out of the rubble; nearby are a few
bras, a child’s toy gun, some CDs, a torn shirt, a crushed shampoo bottle, and
some flip-flops. At the edge of the rubble-field, small boys played makeshift
table tennis on two boards placed atop jerrycans while a young man pushed a
wheelbarrow of salvaged wood with a small Nigerian flag tied to it. In the
evening, boys who clambered barefoot over the upturned, nail-studded boards
received painful wounds.
Mr. Morka, a Harvard-trained lawyer who is
challenging the state government in court over the demolitions, said: “They
want a Lagos that looks good, that feels good, that glitters. But they are well
aware that Lagos is Lagos because of the people that live here. They are doing
this without regard for the people who live here.”
That sentiment — that the government had,
bewilderingly, declared open season on its own people — permeated the Badia
residents.
“I don’t know the reason why they do all this,”
said Ms. Austin, as other residents crowded around. “I don’t know why they
break everything. We don’t expect it, now. People were still sleeping. We
didn’t pack up anything.”
Mr. Aiyenuro, a security guard who said he had
built his house himself, said: “We had thousands of people living here. Now,
everything is destroyed.”
Nobody said they were leaving the area. “There’s
a misguided belief that if you demolish the slum, they will just go back to the
village,” said Megan Chapman, an American lawyer who works with Mr. Morka.
“It’s completely untrue. They don’t just disappear.”
Here and there, hot anger at the governor, Mr.
Fashola, flashed out of the crowd.
“We’re not criminals!” shouted Peter Patersoa, a
39-year-old bricklayer and father of a one-month-old. “Fashola is doing wrong
work! He’s not doing good in Lagos State.”
Another crowd gathered. “We are hoping in God to
favor us,” Mr. Aiyenuro said. “Please, we are suffering.”
NY Times.
NY Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment