By Ishaya Ibrahim
Acting News Editor
Shantytown dwellers in Lagos have accused the state government of demolishing their homes just to grab and sell their lands to the rich without compensation.
The latest seven-day notice the state government served on residents around waterfronts to vacate their homes or face surprise demolition expired on Monday, October 17.
Government officials blame ghettos for providing escape routes for kidnappers and other criminals who use the waterways as a getaway.
However, the new demolitions would displace more than 20,000 families in Ibeshe, Baiyeku, Ikorodu Port, Ikorodu Industrial Estate, Ketu, Oworonshoki, Bariga, Makoko, Ebute Metta, Ilubirin, Osborne Foreshore (Ikoyi), Park View Estate, Banana Island, Lekki Phase 1, Victoria Garden
City, Ajah, and Langbasa.
Similar demolitions have displaced hundreds of thousands without compensation or alternative accommodation, like in Ajeromi Badiya East where more than 20,000 people were rendered homeless on September 17, 2015.
In Kuramo, 80,000 people were displaced in 2012. In Atikporome in Badagry, thousands of others were dispossessed of their homes and lands in 2013.
Badiya East community leader, Aworetan Olatunde, said their land was originally at the National Theatre, Iganmu but the federal government took part of it to build the railway line and later the theatre.
The government swapped their land for Badiya East until it was demolished by the Lagos State government.
Abdul Charles, leader of Badagry demolished community, recounted that in 2013, the state government pounded their homes with bulldozers even when a subsisting court order restrained it from doing so.
The community had been in dispute with the government over the ownership of its land which it claimed belonged to the police.
“We took the Lagos State government to court because all their documents showed that the police land is at Agemawo Agelado which has been lying fallow, while our own is Atikporome.
“While the case was going on; in 2013, as soon as the court gave injunction against further demolition, that angered them and they came forcefully to demolish the communities,” Charles lamented.
He alleged that the state government uses its courts to frustrate the course of justice where the community asks for N100 billion damages.
Three civil society organisations (CSOs) – Spaces for Change, Centre for Children’s Health Education Orientation and Protection CEE-HOPE), and Community Life Project (CLP) – lampooned the demolition at a press conference in Lagos.
They said demolition on the basis of preventing crime is another excuse for tearing down the hovels of the poor and forcefully evicting them from the places they call home.
“Beginning from July 1990 when the Lagos State government appallingly demolished the 300,000-member Maroko community, the reason advanced for the evictions was that Maroko was unfit for human habitation and was in dire need of infrastructural transformation.
“Today, that same Maroko land that was unfit for human habitation is occupied by the powerful and the affluent whose mansions and other magnificent architectural edifices are beyond the reach of former Maroko landowners.
“Lagosians have witnessed a repeat of this unfortunate Maroko treatment in Makoko, Badiya, Pura, and many other locations in the state,” the CSOs said.
A statement signed by Victoria Ohaeri (Spaces for Change), Betty Abah (CEE HOPE) and Ngozi Iwere (CLP), countered that what Governor Akinwumi Ambode calls “shanties” are people’s homes, businesses, schools, and all they have.
“Giving people without means only seven days’ notice to vacate their homes smacks of executive insensitivity.
“Such extremely short notice is coming at a time when inflation rate towers at 17.6 per cent and the economy is in recession, crippling social and economic activities, while triggering massive job losses.
“We particularly find it objectionable that the demolitions are scheduled at the peak of the rainy season.
“Any demolition exercise undertaken at this time would increase the vulnerability of the urban poor families.”
They maintained that a mega city is not built by destroying the homes of the poor and driving them away from the city.
“Demolition exercises only succeed in pushing the poor deeper into poverty, while forcing them to regroup elsewhere to re-establish new slum settlements.”
They said building social housing affordable to low income and very poor households, like the Brazilian Favela, is the way to end slum growth.
For Agbodemu Musbau, executive director of Rural and Urban Development Initiative (RUDI), slums spring up due to extreme poverty, poor town planning, and poor housing development.
“An interesting aspect of the issue is that these slums in Nigeria, which are usually situated on dump sites, low plains below sea level, beside the lagoon or sea, gully erosion sites, etc., are settlements the government can upgrade and make them livable for the people.
“But instead, they evict the people of these settlements and demolish the houses in the area to pave the way for high end middle class housing development, with the result that these evicts have no option but to move to other slum settlements or create new ones,” he said.
