The day the bulldozers came
The demolition of Badia East, Lagos, Nigeria (2013)
By Tolu Ogunlesi
It was like war. Hundreds of policemen, armed with guns, and supported by gangs of men in khaki overalls, wielding sledgehammers. They swarmed in the wake of the bulldozer, finishing off with their guns and hammers what the bulldozer missed, amid threats of “If you love your life move out.”
There were the hundreds, thousands maybe, who were still in bed. It was around 7am on the last Saturday of the month — ‘Environmental Sanitation Day’ in Lagos; generally spent by Lagosians catching up on sleep or cleaning their surroundings.
The bulldozer and its accompanying army were at it all day, until 6pm. The next day they were back, to finish off what they had started. When they finally left, no fewer than 9,000 people had been rendered homeless in the Oke Ilu-Eri and Ajeromi communities of Badia East, a sprawling settlement on a strip of swampland on the edge of the Lagos Mainland, not far from the Apapa Port. Oke Ilu-Eri was completely brought down, while the destruction in Ajeromi was partial.
The Badia East settlement (Badia as a whole comprises Badia East, Badia West and Apataro) was settled in 1973 by some of the villagers — ethnic Ilajes — forcibly displaced from nearby Iganmu by the federal government, which needed land to build a National Arts Theatre. An oil boom at that time had swelled government revenues, resulting in unprecedented wage increases for public servants, and an ambitious public spending programme.
The Ilajes are a riverine people found across South Western Nigeria, and historically associated with fishing communities. A good number of Lagos’ slum communities, including Maroko, demolished in 1990, and Makoko, famously visited by demolition squads in 2012 (resulting in the death of one community leader), are inhabited primarily by Ilaje people.
In the years since 1973 the original Ilaje residents of Badia East have welcomed hordes of people from other ethnic groups, and today many of Nigeria’s hundreds of ethnic groups are represented in the community.
Official estimates put Badia East’s current total population at about 50,000, but it is widely believed that the actual number is at least double that number.
Many of the community’s women are petty traders and shop owners, while the men work as artisans, or in the nearby Apapa Ports (Nigeria’s busiest) and rundown Industrial Estate.
Badia East is also home to a thriving commercial sex industry. In 2002 one local newspaper published a feature titled: “The Prostitutes of Ijora Badia.” In 2008 one NGO staffer told the humanitarian news agency IRIN that it was “one of the largest concentrations of sex workers in the country — virtually every house in the community housed sex workers.” (The IRIN report also mentions a 2007 survey in which a quarter of the sex workers tested turned out to be HIV-positive).
A city of refugees
Bimbo Omowole Osobe, 55, has lived in Ajeromi community for 40 years. She was at home that morning when the bulldozers arrived, but, in the face of the rampaging demolitioners, there was no time to take anything out. “It was like lightning striking,” she recalls “It struck just in a second, before you could think of it.”
She lost her home — which she says was a concrete structure, not a shanty — and two shops in which she sold bottled drinks and water. The only thing that survived in the ruins, she tells me, was an empty soda bottle.
When we meet, at a spot along the still functioning colonial-era railway line that runs through Badia East, she takes me to the church building where some of the evictees sleep. God’s Appraisal Zion Church is a cement brick structure with gaping holes where the windows and doors should be, and flooring that is half-dirt, half-cracked-cement. Atop it sits an unfinished roof — a bed of planks supporting the rusted iron sheets that keep the sun and rain out. The concrete pillars intended to hold the roof were never completed, their upright iron skeletons and the wooden planks that have replaced them testament to rested ambitions.
It is a Sunday afternoon, the church is empty; the loudspeakers silent. In one corner by the entrance sits someone’s belongings, including a kerosene stove. A horde of women seated outside, passing the time.
We leave the church and head for the community centre, which, like the church, is a camp for the displaced. Residents say it was built in the early 1990s by the then first lady, Maryam Babangida, as part of her ‘Better Life for Rural Women’ programme. In[TO1] 2010, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) moved in — the latest in a string of NGO efforts — to serve the Badia East community, and set up a clinic in the centre.
MSF owes its origins to one of the best-known refugee crises of the second half of the 20th century — the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the War of Biafra (1967–1970). It has been described as the first televised war in human history; claiming more than a million civilian casualties. Images of severely malnourished children filled newspapers and TV screens around the world, allegedly prompting US President Lyndon B. Johnson, besieged by protesters calling on him to act, to tell an aide: “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”
It was as much a world war as it was Nigerian; several countries took sides — Britain and the Soviet Union supporting Nigeria; France supporting Biafra. The Scandinavian countries were involved as well — a young Finnish priest famously spraying the word ‘Biafra’ on the wall of Helsinki’s Lutheran Temppeliaukio Church shortly after it was built in 1969, as part of student protests against the war, and Swedish mercenaries flying Biafran planes.
And then there was the group of young French doctors (the best known of whom is Bernard Kouchner, who went on to become France’s minister of health, and later foreign affairs) who volunteered for the Red Cross in the hard-hit breakaway republic. Dissatisfied with what they saw as the Red Cross’ tendency to put partisan interests ahead of medical ones, they founded MSF in 1971.
For two years the MSF hospital, the only public clinic in Badia East, thrived, staffed by doctors and nurses paid by MSF. It even had an ambulance. And everything was free, I am told. Even caesarean sections, which the clinic’s doctors typically referred to the bigger government hospital on Lagos Island, or to a private hospital in Bariga, kept by MSF on a retainer. Those patients who could afford upfront payments were later reimbursed by MSF. Those who didn’t have any money still received treatment. It was a generous health insurance scheme in a country that has public health insurance in name only.
And then, last November, it came to an end. The MSF project ran out of funds, and brought its intervention to an end. The clinic remained, but without the staff, and without the health insurance scheme. All that is left is one nurse, who comes in twice a week, and on emergency summons. The settlement had barely come to terms with that misfortune, when the bulldozers came calling.
Now the clinic, its days of glory behind it, is back to serving as a community centre — this time providing a roof over the heads of as many as can squeeze into its courtyard to sleep, night after night.
It is not difficult to see why MSF, typically associated with war and disaster zones, would set up shop in Badia. It is hard to argue that Lagos is not a city of refugees; every day multitudes flood into it (one estimate says as many as 6,000 people daily) in search of a life better than the one they’ve left behind.
Most of them come from the hinterlands. In the seventies and eighties there was a substantial wave of migration from Benin, Togo and Ghana, leading to the Nigerian government expelling, in 1983 and 1985, more than a million citizens of these countries. In recent years the Lagos State Government has carried out forced “deportations” within Nigeria; rounding up vagrants and street traders and bussing them to neighbouring states and beyond. The most recent raised a storm that dominated news and opinion headlines throughout August.
One migrant I met a few years ago came from a village in Northern Nigeria, 800 kilometers from Lagos, and earned a living cleaning the shoes of the salaried workers toiling in the high-rises that dot the Lagos Marina skyline. Of the roughly $4 dollars he made daily, he tried to save more than half, and the last time he travelled home he told me he gave his parents $80. There are many like him, from all over the country, working as security guards, petty traders and motorcycle-taxi riders — the much talked about informal sector that makes up as much as eighty percent of the Lagos economy.
The migrant flood into Lagos makes sense when one considers that the GDP of Lagos alone is larger than that of many African countries, and is almost a fifth of the national total. Beneath the weight of these migrants any notions of governance quickly crumble. In the absence of the most basic forms of governance (outside of taxation), it is left to residents to fend for themselves. Those who can afford it settle for expensive private schools and hospitals and security and fuel-guzzling power generators and borehole systems; the rest simply exist on the margins; depending on philanthropy, or luck.
In ‘Diary of a Very Bad Year’ (Harper Perennial, 2010), a series of conversations between an “anonymous hedge fund manager” and an American magazine editor in the wake of the global economic meltdown, the fund manager describes Lagos, where he had done some business, as having “this strange juxtaposition of what was clearly modern infrastructure that had just been kind of abandoned to decay — and then total squalor. You’d go one block off a main thoroughfare and the road is dirt. You go to a nice neighborhood, all the houses are behind walls and outside the walls there’s somebody cooking on a garbage fire, right outside the walls of some big house. It’s like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else.”
Largely abandoned, like all other Lagos slum settlements, by successive governments, Badia is only the latest symbol of urban displacement in a city long used to making people move against their wishes. From the 16th to the 19th centuries it was one of the centres of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; hundreds of thousands of people made the journey of no return from Lagos, the busiest port city on what was then known as the ‘Slave Coast’.
In recent decades it has been land-hungry governments pushing the people along. According to a report published in August by the Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC) — arguably the most visible defender of the rights of slum-dwellers in Nigeria; it has worked with the Badia East community since 1996 — in partnership with Amnesty International, and focusing on the February 23 demolitions and forced evictions: “The forced eviction of the residents of Badia East is part of a pattern of forced evictions of people living in informal settlements and in other communities across Lagos state. Amnesty International and SERAC […] have themselves documented numerous forced evictions in Badia, Makoko, Ilaje Otumara and elsewhere in Lagos state since the 1990s. Many of the people who were forcibly evicted by the government from Badia East had experienced at least two to three forced evictions and been forced to rebuild their lives from scratch each time.”
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Ayinke Stephen was born in Badia East, shortly after it was established in 1973, and has lived all her life there. It is the only home she knows. She attended the public primary school in the community, which today remains the only public primary school Badia can boast of.
Today she works as the coordinator of the Vanguard Plus Initiative, a support group for ‘Persons Living With HIV/AIDS’. She herself is living with HIV/AIDS.
Like everyone else she lost almost everything. She was in her shop that morning, which sits next to the Community Center, in the section of the community untouched by the demolition. “Someone came to call me from my shop, that there’s a bulldozer around,” she recalls. She rushed home. She says the bulldozer driver explained that there was nothing to worry about, that a mechanical fault had stranded his machine there. Within minutes the place was swarming with members of the demolition Task Force.
Some residents were away when the demolition squad arrived. One told Nigeria’s Punch Newspaper that when the news got to her, “I ran all the way from Costain and found the government officials pulling down my home. They did not allow me to enter my home. I tried to force my way in and in the process, I got injured.”
Stephen has since sent three of her children to Ghana to be with her mother-in-law, so that their education will not suffer. To that extent her children are luckier than most — since the demolitions happened many of the affected children have been out of school. With family life disrupted and parents out of work — many of the residents and unable to buy uniforms and textbooks, going to school has been a challenge. Osobe’s three children are currently scattered across the country, and have not been in school since the demolitions.
Stephen recalls that the first forced eviction she witnessed happened in 1986. The day it happened she was at school in Orile-Iganmu, a neighbouring community. She returned to find her parents and grandmother on the streets, their home gone. And then another round followed in 2003. The shock of the 1986 evictions caused her grandmother to have a stroke, she says, the consequences of which burdened her until her death in 1999.
“Where do you want us to start from?” she says.
It is the one question the government has not found answers to. There have been several meetings, but not much help or empathy from the government, residents allege. Osobe tells me of one meeting scheduled for the Lagos Airport Hotel that ended up with no government representation; and another at the Sheraton Hotel, organized by Amnesty International, attended by the State Attorney General. There was also a rally at the Governor’s Office; after waiting for hours without seeing the Governor they were eventually told by an official to return the next day.
One encounter with government officials, in the premises of Channels Television (which has devoted a lot of attention to the story), stands out. She alleges that a female government official was verbally abusive, calling the protesting residents “animals”.
She proudly adds that the residents refrained from unruly behavior. “We’re responsible people. We showed maturity. That we’re less privileged does not mean we’re not sensible. They cannot be calling us animals and we’ll be behaving like animals.”
A better life?
The Lagos State government regards its recent interventions as part of an “urban regeneration” programme. In July 2006, the World Bank approved a $200 million loan for a ‘Lagos Metropolitan Development and Governance Project’ (LMDGP) — to provide, according to the project website, “infrastructural development in nine of the biggest slums in Lagos.”
At the heart of the Badia East controversy — Badia is one of the nine beneficiary communities of the project — appears to be the interpretation of the LMDGP’s objectives. The Lagos State Government sees it as justification for the demolitions, and says its vision is to give the inhabitants a better life.
On a visit to Badia after the demolitions Governor Fashola announced that his government plan was to, “instead of bulldozing you, bulldoze away your difficult conditions” — through the provision of roads, drainages and clinics. He also spoke of being “committed to building 1008 flats in Badia, to take people out of living on a refuse heap.”
SERAC contends that “the vague plans that do exist for allocation of these housing units indicate that most of them will be unaffordable for the residents of Badia”, and is insisting that any regeneration project must for the benefit of current residents.
“Instead of improving the living conditions of these people, as the government has committed to do under the LMDGP, it has destroyed people’s homes and businesses,” SERAC says.
Badia East’s evictees are deeply grateful to SERAC for providing relief materials, advocacy, legal representation (SERAC has helped file a suit at a Lagos High Court, challenging the evictions). On the day of the demolition, when a group of men were arrested by the police for trying to help resident Omolayo Ibrahim salvage her deep freezer, it was SERAC that helped bail them.
SERAC has also been helping drive local and international media coverage, and in August 2013 it published, in partnership with Amnesty International, a report on the evictions.
SERAC says the residents were not consulted or given any notice before the arrival of the demolition squad. The government disputes this, insisting it gave advance warning — an “abatement of nuisance” notice.
In August the State Attorney General, Ade Ipaye told Channels Television that the Governor visited the community at least twice — 2008 and 2012 — to “[make] it clear that it was not permissible for people to build so-called homes on refuse” and “tell them that Government would not permit a community to spring up here; that [they] have to leave.”
He also said that it the area was not only “unsanitary” but had also been overrun by criminal gangs. “Government had to do something.”
That the area pulled down was a refuse dump, and not a housing settlement, is one consistent argument from the government. Residents on their part ask how eviction notices could have been delivered to a dump.
Amnesty International says has also published satellite imagery showing that 36,000 square meters of “high-density structures” — numbering more than 200 — were destroyed in Badia East on February 23.
SERAC is hopeful that it can bring an end to forced evictions in Lagos.
“Over the years we’ve seen some steps forward, and some steps back. Courts in Lagos are reluctant to rule against the executive in a suit against the [Lagos state government] when the executive [arm] is the one who ordered the forced eviction,” says Andrew Maki, a SERAC staff lawyer and author of the SERAC-Amnesty report. “But forced evictions are illegal under international law, and illegal under Nigerian law; so sooner or later a court of appeal will issue a strong rebuke to one of the countless judgments we’ve received at the first instance which fly in the face of legality.”
Maki also acknowledges that “inroads [have been made] with certain government stakeholders in [an] attempt to build partnerships and propose alternatives to forced evictions, like in-situ upgrades, and participatory development efforts”.
One of the results of SERAC’s engagement is the establishment of a ‘Badia East Technical Committee’, comprising Badia East community members alongside state government officials, to provide support to the evictees, to create a database of victims, and to work out a compensation plan.
But financial or housing compensation can only go so far. Some things have changed irrevocably. Osobe, who says she has just moved into a room in Ajeromi — all the while she’s slept under a mosquito net in the courtyard of the Community Center, braving sun and rain — recalls how the same politicians now justifying the demolition used to flock to Badia on election campaigns, two years ago.
“We didn’t vote for you so you could come and destroy our lives.”
