IBRAHIM ADEYEMI spent three nights with some homeless Nigerians in Lagos, to have a front-row experience of how they are coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. He documented the plights and pains of the vulnerable homeless, who are forgotten and excluded from the sanctuary of a roof.
Nwamaka Bernard, a mother of three, says she’s an epitome of sorrow; a poor and homeless mother who believes life is not fair to her and her children.
It was drizzling in the city of Lagos; time was 10p.m. on a Wednesday in June. While other families stayed at home to enjoy the warmth of their beds, the forty-something-year-old mother and her children- Wale, 18, John, 11 and Mercy, 6- had no particular place to lay their heads.
“Life doesn’t give everyone what they deserve,” says the widow as she recounts her travails to this reporter who spent the night with the poor family in their jagged temporary abode conditionally allocated to them by some good-spirited individuals in the undeveloped part of Lagos Island.
Where the whole family now lives is a tattered kiosk built on the rubble of the Island. Inside the mini-room are remains of pots, chunks of concrete, dirty plates and buckets.
“They gave us this place to manage out of compassion for the love they have towards the children,” says Mrs. Bernard
The current situation of the family of five mirrors the unpleasant condition of housing in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with an estimated population of over 200 million.
Homelessness is a long-time riddle in the country but the emergence of Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the existing conundrum. According to a national newspaper, statistics on housing show that Nigeria had a housing deficit of 17 million units, in 2018. And, in 2016 the World Bank projected that it would cost the country about N59.5 trillion to address the deficit.
Also, in 2017, the Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) announced that over 108 million Nigerians were technically homeless.
Global Homelessness Statistics had also said there are an estimated 24.4 million homeless people in Nigeria in 2020. This is a consequence of many factors, including rapid urbanisation, poverty (UNHCR, 2007), and insurgency in the north eastern part of the country. In 2018, 613,000 people were displaced due to natural disasters, and a further 541,000 due to violence and conflict (Internal Displacement, 2019).
Moreover, 70percent of Lagos’ population, it was projected, lives in informal housing, and many face homelessness due to the authorities’ attempts to curb the capital’s rapid growth (CBC, 2017).
Homelessness, therefore, has long been an epidemic in Nigeria before Covid-19 came to aggravate the situation.
As of July, 2020, the country has recorded over 30, 000 coronavirus cases and over 650 people have died of the contagious disease. Apart from exposing the rots in the country’s health-care system, the pandemic has adversely affected Nigeria’s economy, wrecked businesses and rendered many individuals financially helpless.
However, to contain the virus, the Federal Government ordered lockdown in Lagos, Ogun and Abuja and later on, the country began the “phased and gradual” ease of the lockdown.
But sadly, while many Lagos residents stayed at home to observe the lockdown, many others who are homeless in the megacity had no homes to stay.
When, for example, Mrs. Bernard was asked how she and her children survived during the compulsory stay-at-home order, she said: “We almost died of hunger; there were no palliatives for us and we heard they shared things. It’s terrible. It’s sad.”
Homeless, not hopeless
18-year-old Wale is a promising son to his poor mother, Mrs. Bernard. He is “a wonder child of the family,” striving to have a brighter future, despite his awful present. Wale believes that although he is homeless, he is not hopeless.
If young Wale is not doing menial jobs to assist the family, his mother says, he spends his leisure time reading books and studying despite the stay-in-your-home mandate imposed on Nigerian students and pupils because of the pandemic.
The boy expresses the pains of the family, juxtaposes their past and present and explains how Covid-19 has only come to expose them to more severity and poverty.
“I’m begging both the state and local governments to help us; we are suffering really,” he says, opening the chapters of their woes one after the other.
“We’ve been homeless for more than a year now. Before coming here, we lived in Ajegunle, where we rented a room.
“But whenever it rained, the area became flooded, destroying things in the room we were staying in. So, we had to pack as ordered by our landlord; after all, we couldn’t pay the bills for the house rent.
“Before we came here, their present abode, we had stayed with a relative but we weren’t allowed to stay inside the house. We slept outside instead, doing slavery for them, so to say.
“One day, my mom poured soup accidentally on the floor and they asked us to leave the house, so we came here to stay,” he recounts.
Unless there is adequate support, the mother says, Wale may not be able to finish schooling. Sadly, at this moment when pupils and students are ordered to desert their classrooms in dizzying droves, many are reportedly recruited as hawkers on the streets of Lagos; this exposes them to more danger. And Wale is one of them.
But thankfully, the mother said his son is one of the prodigies of the high order on the Island, despite their travails and homelessness. He never joins the bad boys, who are metaphorically referred to as ‘AlangbaEko‘, meaning Lizards of Lagos.
Wale, however, says he feels very bad most of the time, being homeless but he is grateful that he is pursuing his academic dreams, even though Covid-19 is tampering with it. He also thanks his “mini-messiahs” on the street who occasionally offer to help him and the family.
No home, No job
For Tope Juwon, 28, surviving the pandemic has been very tough; he is poor and itinerant, moving from one place to another and managing to survive.
“I don’t have a particular place where I stay, I just squat with people. My accommodation isn’t stable. I lived in Ibadan before coming over to Lagos. My parents are deceased. But I was already here before they passed away. I came to Lagos to work and to hustle. I have family members that live in Oshodi.
“During the lockdown, I was just managing, squatting with people. Sometimes, I go to meet my family members for small change to manage myself,” says Juwon, hoping to get a job opportunity to have a better living.
At Adeniji Adele area of Lagos where this reporter met Juwon, he explained that he just left the Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) where he worked as a street cleaner because he was owed and had no other means of survival.
And truly, some weeks ago, a supervisor working with LAWMA lamented the lack of payment of workers’ salaries for three months. In a trended video on the social media, the official in an emotion-laden tone slammed the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of LAWMA, stressing that he had no pity and compassion for men and women cleaning the roads.
The young man is one of the 42percent Nigerians that, according to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, were working before the outbreak of coronavirus and its complications took their jobs. The NBS survey revealed that respondents about 5 in 10 amongst the poorest households in the country (45 per cent) stopped working due to COVID-19, and the wealthiest households, about 4 in 10 (39 percent) lost their jobs.
Therefore, Juwon’s plight of homelessness has been doubled by joblessness and all he desperately needs now, according to him, is accommodation, then a job.
Seven straight years without a home
Another man who simply identified himself as Raphael told this reporter how he had trekked the streets of Lagos, from places to places, and spent seven straight years without a home. Raphael, a 45-year-old man is a casual worker in a Local Government, which he refused to name, because he “doesn’t want trouble”.
“I’ve been sleeping around on the streets now for about seven years. And the experience so far has been challenging. They wanted to renovate the house I was living in because the house was not good. They’ve renovated it but the cost after renovation was very high. So, I had to pack out,” says the man, narrating his experience.
He continues: “I have family members, but they are not willing to help, and I can’t force them. I have five elder sisters and they are married and I’m the first son of my family. Although, I stayed with one of my sisters for a while, it’s not good for me. Sometimes, I eat and sometimes, I don’t. Things are not easy, especially during this period.”
The poor man from Delta State said his wife is living with her own parents with their three children. “And whenever I have money, I call them to come and collect,” he said.
Raphael said he was not the only local government worker having accommodation problem.
“We are many, and we have sought help for accommodation and they said we should hold on; they said they can lend us money and they will remove it from our salaries. They are still saying we should hold on because of this Covid-19,” he said.
Grandma laments of homelessness with four grandchildren
On the street of Sura area of Lagos Island dwell Fatima Balogun, a grandma, and her four grandchildren. The homeless sexagenarian says Covid-19 has exposed her and the grandchildren to the tougher side of poverty. The children, she says, lost their parents and she is left with no other option than to take care of them. But she is a poor widow, she says.
“How then are we going to survive this hard time?” she asks, waiting for no one to provide the answer and continues the conversation with the reporter.
“I used to live in Ayobo with my late husband; after the death of my husband, the landlord sold the house to someone so we had to leave. One of my brothers, who worked with the Council, helped me but he soon got tired too. I’ve been managing since then. I used to sell food for a living then but not anymore,” the old woman says.
Sadly, the grandma and the children say they spent the lockdown period in tears and agony; no food and no palliatives from the government. And they only fed on the remnants of food donated by good individuals on the street.
“One day, some of these government people came here saying they wanted to share food and money. The day they all came around to share the money, instead of giving it to the old people like me, they gave it to area boys. When I confronted them, the police officers chased me away. Some people from the council had come before and promised to help us. They even took our pictures,” she recalls.
She also says: “How I’ve been coping is the Lord’s doings. My father’s pension, I couldn’t collect. And, some good people gave us food; they gave the children food too. I won’t lie; it has not been easy for us. The government should come to our aid and help us,” the woman says, stressing that the “government should not forget us here”.
The Lagos’ ‘affordable housing’ crisis
Lagos attained the status of a megacity in 2010 and ever since, poor housing policies keep adding to the challenge of homelessness as more than 77 people come to the city every hour, from other parts of Nigeria.
Many residents of the state have lamented over the tragedy they face renting apartments in the city. In fact, Lagos was recently regarded as the city where finding a home to rent is a difficult mission or a city where you pay a year’s rent up front.
This conundrum is undoubtedly caused by shylock house owners and housing agents who continuously extort citizens looking for where to hide their heads. All these make it difficult for low-income earners such as Nwamaka, Raphael and others to get access to both public and private houses.
This situation worsened in April, during the Covid-19 total lockdown in some states in Nigeria, when the Lagos government rendered hundreds of residents of the state homeless after demolishing about 30 houses in Ogba. The demolition sparked lots of criticisms on why the government would render poor citizens homeless, without providing them alternatives.
But in the face of the affordable housing crisis and deficits in Lagos, where slum dwellers are displaced in their thousands, the state government has only established public housing schemes which, environmental experts say favours only the rich and leaves the poor with terrible options of unaffordability and inaccessibility.
Olubukola Salako, director, Public Affairs, Lagos Ministry of Housing, did not respond to the journalist’s probes on the efforts of the state government to cater for the homeless in terms of accessibility, availability and affordability of both public and private houses, especially as Covid-19 pandemic hit them dangerously.
‘We can’t afford to ignore the homeless’
Reacting, Festus Adebayo, President of the Housing Development Advocacy Network, called on the government and the private sector to put measures in place for homeless Nigerians in the country during the period of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We cannot afford to ignore the homeless in our cities. There are many people living under bridges, in slums, and uncompleted buildings. Providing decent shelter for them at this time can be an effective way of limiting the spread of the virus,” Adebayo said.
He also raised concerns on how the government has abandoned the homeless especially during this period of Covid-19 pandemic and urged the authorities to pay more attention to the homeless.
“At this crucial time, we call on the government to roll out palliatives in the area of rental payment, mortgage payment obligations and downward review of interest rates lest occupiers of mortgaged houses might lose them,” he noted.
However, Aminat Yunus, programme manager of Four Builders Initiative, recommended that the Lagos State authorities should, through the local government, do proper documentation of the homeless in the state so that they can be well catered for. She said this why reacting to the reporter’s findings.
“Homeless citizens in Lagos deserve attention from the government; they are as important as others.
“And the first thing the government needs to do is proper documentation of the homeless in the society. So, Lagos State authorities should go through the local government to document people without homes and then cater for their needs,” she advised.
“If we continue to ignore these people, they will constitute a nuisance to society — more reasons the government needs to really show concern, especially at this moment of pandemic,” she added.
Support for this report was provided by Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism with funding support from Free Press Unlimited.
