Adeolu Williams, her children, including a six-month-old baby, slept in the cold after their home was destroyed by officials of the Lagos State government on December 21, 2020 – four days to Christmas.
The demolition of a shack community in Odeniran in Opebi, Ikeja, was executed by the state’s Task Force team and officials from the Ministry of Transportation, residents confirmed to BusinessDay.
From Oyo State, Williams, a hairdresser and pedicurist, has lived in Odeniran community for six years and was one of the nursing mothers in the area who were displaced.
She and others explained that the government personnel stormed the place intending to impound vehicles from a mechanic shop located under a bridge in the area, and another opposite their home, only for them to turn to their community and destroyed their plank shelters.
With no help from anywhere, nowhere to go, the women and their families slept on mats spread on the ruins of their houses.
“We slept outside in the cold yesterday with our new-born babies,” she said.
Multiple sources told BusinessDay that the demolition came as a shock to the residents, as they claimed not to be pre-informed.
The residents said they woke up in the morning and saw the Task Force team, who swooped in wanting “to burst the place” without prior notice.
The community members said they were asked to go plead with a certain commissioner identified as “Omotosho,” who was on ground to supervise the demolition, to spare their homes.
But the pleading fell on deaf ears.
“They said the senator was outside. They said we should go and beg the man. We did but he didn’t accept. They came and asked us to bring out our properties before the destroyed everything.
“I don’t have anywhere to go because I have three kids, and just gave birth to my child through Caesarean section,” Williams said, pleading for help from the government.
The residents of Odeniran community are alleging that they were never been informed and therefore accusing the state of forcefully evicting the poor in its estimated 20 million population due to its long history of forceful evictions of slum communities.
In most cases, the victims also accuse the government of not notifying them and also not compensating, or resettling them. Sometimes, only a very short notice is given, they claim.
In January 2020, 4,500 residents of Takwa Bay were told to pack up their belongings immediately within an hour in a chaotic scene that featured gunfire.
In November 2016, 30,000 residents of Otodo Gbame community were forced out of their homes as well as their neighbours in Ebute-Ikate community, according to Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation.
There have also been forceful evictions in previous years and even beyond 2016. According to Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, over 2.3 million residents in Nigeria have been forcefully evicted from their homes by the government in the last 20 years.
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Under the Lagos State Urban and Regional Planning and Development Law, specifically Section 26 (3), shanty communities like the one in Odenira are illegal structures and as such could be demolished by the state.
Successive Lagos governors have brought mayhem on slum dwellers acting on this law.
For instance, the former governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, announced on October 9, 2016, government’s intention to “start demolishing all shanties on waterfronts across the State within 7 days,” citing kidnapping incidences as the justification.
40 communities were to be affected with an estimated over 300,000 residents at risk of imminent eviction.
Justice Onigbanjo of the Lagos State High Court in a fundamental rights enforcement case brought in October 2016 ruled against Ambode’s action.
Relying on the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules, 2009, Onigbanjo said he found these demolitions to be inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of the right to dignity enshrined in Section 34 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Article 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Again, such demolitions have been condemned by human rights activists who describe it as rights violations and an evidence of lack of empathy for poor communities, and more so because of the violent manner in which they are done and without alternative settlements.
“We keep seeing this lack of thoughtfulness and empathy on the part of the government,” Dapo Awobeku, programme officer with Enough is Enough Nigeria, a social advocacy organisation, told Quartz Africa. With the evictions often happening without compensation or plans for resettlement, there isn’t enough consideration for “what happens next” for evictees,” Awobeku said.
The shanty community located in Odeniaran Opebi in Ikeja area is surrounded by both private homes and a huge dumpsite.
Around 180 persons were displaced on the day of the clampdown by the government. Women were mostly affected as BusinessDay observed at the scene as they were more at the scene, sitting helplessly while scavengers made away with what they could carry.
Some of the women, like Williams, were not living with their husbands in the location. Others like Olushola Joseph are widows.
The population of children in the area was quite high, with some under 12 years helping out with salvaging properties.
The affected evictees built their lives from scratch in the place with some parents giving birth to almost all their children there, hence, the only home they have come to know and have.
Residents like Edris Bukar and his wife Sa-adatu Edris have lived there for five years. Although he moved from Ijora Oloye, he gave birth to all his children in Lagos – most of them in Odeniran.
He left his farmland to Lagos where he started hawking clothes before eventually moving to the community.
Bukar said he could not go back to his hometown and farm in Goza, Borno State, because Boko Haram terrorists have occupied everywhere.
He said some of the Northern young men in Lagos also fled to the state because of insecurity with nothing to do and eat.
“So, I asked my wife to make food and be selling to them, that is how we got here (Odeniran) and since, we’ve been here for five years.
“They just came from nowhere without any notice, they came and destroyed our homes. We don’t know if it was an order from the government or the owner of the land. I don’t know where to go now,” he told this correspondent.
Also complaining to BusinessDay, Olushola Joseph, a petty trader from Ayetoro, Ogun State, said nobody told them that they did not want them there.
She recalled a time the authorities complained about the mechanic workshops under the bridge (mentioned earlier), including the one sitting opposite their shacks.
Joseph, also a widow, said nobody expected it, especially because the government officials were from the Transport Ministry and not from the Ministry of Environment.
“There were new-born babies among us,” she said. “Everyone spread mats and slept outside. That’s how we’re going to spend Christmas because we have nowhere to go and there is no money,” she said.
She added that if there was money to afford rent, they would not stay in such a place, and also noted that during the peak of COVID-19 in Nigeria, no government official remembered to give them help.
Another resident, a fashion designer and a music artiste, expressed disappointment and shock that a government she had actively supported and voted for could snatch livelihood from her in such an inhumane manner.
The fashion designer, Edith Ella Omobuwa, asked why the government treated them like none Nigerians when in normal circumstance it was their responsibility to provide shelters for them.
As a citizen who has been voting since she turned 18 years old, Omobuwa believes she deserved better treatment.
Despite joining the long list of displaced persons in the state, she still hopes that the Lagos State government can provide modernised shanties—even “her own dear Jagaban (Bola Ahmed Tinubu) can do it.”
“There is nothing bad in giving us shelter instead of building homes for themselves and family members with our own money. We’re citizens of this nation, but they are just treating us as if we’re animals and we don’t belong to this nation, Nigeria,” she said.
A suspicious operation
The demolition came to the victims as suspicious. Two factors are responsible for this:
First, despite identifying the state officials as being from the Ministry of Transportation, the residents had doubts about who ordered the demolition.
Narrating the incident to this reporter, one victim said she was uncertain it was an order from the government or the owner of the land. Since the shanties were built on a private property, another group felt the owner could have ordered the eviction.
Essentially, residents said if the government wanted to evict them, the Ministry of Environment would have been involved.
“They didn’t give us any notice before they came. I’ve been hearing that the land belongs to someone,” said Abayomi Oyelekan, a musician living in the area.
Secondly, they reported that Task Force officers arrested people who tried to film and take pictures of the demolition exercise. This was therefore seen as an operation that was meant to be done quietly and unnoticed.
However, inferring from past forceful evictions where various security outfits were deployed and in the case of the Otodo Gbame community, where a group of thugs set fire on homes allegedly assisted by the police, it appears the state does not have a specific agency responsible for demolitions.
A global problem that results in humanitarian crisis
Every year, millions of people around the world are forcibly evicted from their homes and their land, often leaving them living in extreme poverty and destitution.
Forced eviction is a global problem that has attracted the attention of international bodies. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 7 sees it as “the permanent or temporary removal against their will of individuals, families, and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection.”
It constitutes a gross violation of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing, according to the Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 1993/77, and violates a stream of internationally recognized human rights, including the rights to adequate housing, food, water, health, education, work, security of the person, freedom from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and freedom of movement.
The Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 1993/77 further notes that forced evictions and homelessness intensify social conflict and inequality, and invariably affect the poorest, most socially, economically, environmentally and politically disadvantaged and vulnerable sectors of society.
However, generally, evictions absent due process of law [and] constitute a violation of the Nigerian Constitution, said Andrew Maki, co-director of Justice and Empowerment Initiatives (JEI).
Maki also stressed that the act pushes the urban poor deeper into poverty, further to the margins—both spatially and socially—and further affirm a culture of complete distrust of the government.
“Forced evictions result in humanitarian crises—large numbers of people homeless, often without any alternatives whatsoever, end up sleeping on the street, eventually moving to other informal settlements,” he told BusinessDay in a conversation.
Forced eviction should be abolished
Bimbo Oshobe, co-founder of Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, said forced evictions should be abolished totally because they create more problems for the society—insecurities are one of the major problems that come from forced eviction.
Oshobe asserts that the practice is as deadly as any deadly disease that one could think of, stating many lives are lost in the process as well as livelihoods and some children end up not going back to school again.
She notes that many people who have been displaced end up being separated from their families because life is never the same again.
“It takes the majority long years if at all to be able to stand up again. While some people will never recover at all due to lack of financial help,” she said in a chat with this publication.
She proposes that government should have data on her citizens to be able to plan with the people and always have other resettlement actions put in place than forcing people out of their homes and living them on the streets.
Speaking with BusinessDay, Betty Abah, founder of CEE-HOPE, a non-governmental organisation, condemned the act, describing it as a classical example of how crude, detached, and outrightly dehumanising the Lagos State government had treated the urban poor.
“I mean, who does that? You render people homeless just about four days to Christmas and in the midst of a major fear about another surge of COVID-19 infection? Where do they go to? Where is care, empathy, and love that is meant to be shown in this festive period?” Abah quizzed, visibly upset.
For her, no matter the angle the case is viewed or entitlement to the land, the fact that Lagos carries out a routine, mass displacement of city dwellers especially in the informal housing every year, is a pointer to the gross deficit in housing in the megacity that has been put to over four million houses.
According to her, a responsive and responsible government would want to address that major challenge especially because housing is a right and not a privilege.
“But the Lagos State Government has no regards for the human rights, dignity, or even existence of these people yet every four years they go to their communities to get their votes. What could be more callous than that?” she thought.
While emphasizing the need to addressed the issue as the poor would not disappear from Lagos, she and added that they have a right and should not continue to be treated like animals.
The petition
The evictees told BusinessDay that they have been living in peace and not being a bother to anyone. But Ajibade Abdulwaheed, a mechanic, disagrees.
Abdulwaheed owns a mechanic shop opposite the shanty community. He pays rent on the land he runs his business.
He said people [neighbours] have been complaining about their attitude. They complain about the dirtiness, and the smoking, he explained.
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The dumpsite in the area was another source of complaint which drew the attention of the Ministry of Environment which had gone there to take pictures.
Although he is not happy with the demolition as their presence there also serves as security for him and his shop, he said these complaints have led to several petitions against the people.
“When these happen, the people here won’t live comfortably,” he said. “We’ve been talking to each other on what the government wants.
“Lagos State has been complaining. I went to Alausa with one woman one time because of the issue. People have already written a petition against them severally.”
The journalist contacted the commissioner for Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotoso, through a phone call in order to get him to answer questions on the development, but he did not pick. Questions were also sent to him via SMS and Whatsapp, but again, no reply.
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