Lagos renewal projects and plight of the displaced

The on-going road construction in most parts of the Lagos metropolis, particularly Lekki, has rendered many residents homeless, writes FUNKE ADETUTU


Adetokunbo Ademola Street on Victoria Island is a beehive of activities this sunny April morning. Cars and buses crisscross the busy street while their movement is occasionally interrupted by the red signal of the traffic light at a nearby junction. As a commercial lane, all kinds of buildings are situated on either side of this rather long road. And it is among these buildings that the Archbishop Taylor Memorial School is located.
Overlooking the school is the popular Eko Hotel and Suites. The school building is dwarfed by the imposing height of the hotel which is nestled on a vast acre of land across the road. Passers-by may be unaware that behind the yellow wall of this school lie countless stories hidden in the hearts of its pupils.
Eight-year-old Joy Sule is a Primary Four pupil of this school. She looks bright, yet forlorn in her blue uniform which is marked by little brownish stains. Her brown oversized rubber sandal is dusty while her little toes peep through the large hole in her white-turned-brown socks. A native of Abeokuta, she has been living with her grandmother since she was five but now lives with her sister. Her mother, who used to live somewhere along the Lekki/Ajah Road, has been rendered homeless due to the on-going road construction in that part of the Lagos Metropolis. She now lives in one of the shacks at the bar beach.
Asked about her father, Joy’s face is puckered in a furrow redolent of pain and dejection. “My father is mad,” she replies sharply but innocently.
Equally pathetic is the story of five-year-old Mariam Victor who is unsure of her surname. Her mother died about two weeks ago and she has yet to be informed at the time of this report. She now lives with a police officer’s wife at the Police Barracks, Bar Beach. Joy and Mariam are just two of the numerous children affected by the ongoing reconstruction effort at Lekki. Their young hearts bear this burden even as they sit for their second term exams this morning.
Sad as it is, the trauma of these children may serve as an eye-opener for many people who may not know the enormity of the socio-economic problems that low-income workers or unemployed families in the metropolis have been facing, as there are new dimensions in respect of children whose parents are alive but have become destitute. This may result from one of the parents being too ill to work or the other disappearing due to poverty or job loss. Hence, some children like Joy and her peers who seek refuge at a school have been exposed to enormous deprivations.
Joseph Abolade, an education consultant, finds these deprivations intolerable, particularly in a city like Lagos where the government appears to be trying very hard to better the lot of residents without knowing the amount of suffering they have been experiencing.
As the head of a team set up by the Lekki Concession Company to look into the plight of the displaced people of Lekki and its environs, Abolade explains that being rendered homeless is too much for a parent let alone a child who has to combine this with study (for those who have the benefit of education).
He observes that children are not the only ones affected as parents, some of whom have been sleeping in the open or in shacks have lost their jobs. Thus, the story of 40- year-old Funmilayo Ajayi is quite instructive. She is among those who have sought refuge in one of the classrooms at the Archbishop Taylor Memorial School. She has been living on the school premises for two years while she had lived at Alasia on Victoria Island for 15 years before her shop was demolished. Funmilayo has been surviving on the meagre money she earns from selling Eko, otherwise called Pap, and sweeping the school premises. “We were not given any notice before the demolition,” she laments in a shaky voice. “We live here in the school premises. Although they are not inconveniencing us, yet it’s not a conducive place to live in. The school is owned by government and I can’t live here forever. We can all be asked to leave any time.”
Ajayi’s immediate concern is shelter for herself and her daughter, who is a pupil of the Archbishop Taylor Memorial School. “All my children are girls. I’m concerned about their future. I don’t want them to pass through what I have passed through. I’m concerned about their education,” she says.
Going back to her village in Saki, Oyo State is not an option Ajayi would consider as the state government has suggested. This is because she believes she would be unable to reconnect with a society she left many years ago.
“It would not be easy for those who have left their respective hometowns to return after so many years,” observes Marion Sikuade, director, Childlife Line, a non-governmental organisation. “What do they want to return to? Nothing. There is no house, money or job. One can also imagine the psychological effect it will have on them. Their ego would be bruised.”
Abolade also explains that the expectation of most people who migrate to Lagos from other states to make quick wealth is one of the factors that would make the state government’s pronouncement impossible. “Once a person has come to Lagos, the expectation is that he will go back a richer person, a person to whom people can now look up and say ‘what have you brought back for us from Lagos?’ Therefore, many of them will find it difficult to go back because of the shame. They will rather stay here and continue to suffer,” he says.
Therefore, one of the crucial needs of Lagos inhabitants is housing, for which reason Elijah Olapade, managing consultant, Elijah Olapade and Company, an estate surveying company, suggests that the state government declare housing an emergency. “It is sad that so many millions of people even here in Lagos are homeless,” he laments. “I believe that it is possible for the state government to replicate the kind of Council flats available in the UK. The Land Use Act is also a problem. People have been clamouring for a review of the Land Use Act. The Act was to make land available for people but the reverse is the case. The Land Use Act has recovered land from people and has put it in the pocket of government. What the Federal Government should do, because Lagos State alone cannot do this, is that there should be a policy guideline that will protect the interest of the populace when housing is concerned.”
Hence, finding an immediate solution is something that may not be within reach because the displaced people don’t even know who to turn to. “One thing I experienced is that after I have interviewed them, they look up to you and say ‘what help can you render me now?’ here and now,” says Abolade. “And you become powerless because their is no help you can render. Even if you dip your hands into the pocket and give then N200 or more; the question is, how far does that go? You find cases like that which make you rather numb and depressed. I’m not putting this at the feet of anybody. It’s just that Lagos is such a magnet which draws people from other parts of the country.”
The solutions to the myriad of problems plaguing the state do not lie solely with the government, declares Abolade; although he thinks the country should work at a system whereby people would be kept busy doing something. “There has to be a very virile ministry of employment; people that will keep data of where labour is available. It is a very complex issue because how do you know who is working at building sites and all that? It means we have to register all artisans. The government ought to be kept informed about where work is going on,” he explains.
Also, he suggests that government should put in place social security benefits for its citizens. “It is complex and mind-boggling because some of our people are too dishonest. Even when they have a job doing, when they know that money is available from government they will tell you they have no job to do. Hence, that is a big problem but that does not mean if government has the chance it cannot start it off.”
Nevertheless, some corporate organisations like the Lekki Concession Company have started helping some of the displaced people.
“The first step is to understand what the problems are. It is for this reason we have engaged the service of professionals who are knowledgeable in the field of taking care of street children and displaced people. It is after we have understood the problems that we can proffer solutions. It is because we want to help that we have carried out a survey,” says Charles Imevbore, head, corporate affairs and communication, LCC.
The infrastructural development in Lagos State is a positive development that most of its residents are happy with but the displaced people feel short-changed by the whole process. And so, they patiently await compensations that will better their lot.

On the verge of breaking down

FUNKE ADETUTU

In the mid-1990s when R. Kelly released his album, I believe I can Fly, it was a hit. It was played in every nook and cranny of the country. So it was no surprise that as a student then, I was captivated by the inspirational lyric and Kelly’s great voice. In fact, it got to a point I had to learn the lyric by heart. It was the song I loved to listen to whenever my spirit was low or I was experiencing difficult times.
I can still vividly remember a particular line of the song which has remained on my mind ever since: “See I was on the verge of breaking down, sometimes silence can seem so loud.”
About two months ago, I chanced upon Isabel Allende’s novel, Paula, which I began to read almost immediately. That was the first time I would be coming upon Allende’s book. I’ve heard of House of the Spirits, which was her first novel but I have never read it. I was captivated by the first line of Paula. And it was after I had gone more than halfway into the novel that I realised how instructive it was for Isabel Allende to have begun her novel that way. “Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost. The legend of our family begins at the end of the last century...” read the first and second lines. For me, there is no better way a great writer can start a novel of this nature, especially when the writer is in such great despair.
Paula is a true-life story about the anguish of the author whose daughter, Paula, falls gravely ill and thereafter sinks into a coma. The novel was written during the interminable hours the author spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital (which she called the corridor of lost steps) and in the hotel room where she lived for several months, as well as beside her daughter’s bed back home in California, USA during the summer and fall of 1992.
It was an agonising period for Isabel Allende who had passed through so much in life marriage-wise besides being born into a family which was at the centre of the 1970s political turmoil in Chile.
For me, the narrative is more than a memoir. It is a tender, moving and vivid record of a mother’s agony at the bedside of her daughter. It’s a long letter written by a mother to a dying child in an effort to restore her fast ebbing life. The author shares with the readers her most intimate feelings which results in an emotionally charged, spellbinding memoir.
Life throws all sorts of things our way, and for some people, the best way to pour out the anguish lurked in the inner recesses of their minds is to write. Through their writings, many authors have climbed huge mountains and surmounted great challenges. For most authors and musicians, the deeper the wound, the more private the grave until they let it out through their music or book.
All they need is a medium that will enable them pour out that emotion, the feeling that has been bottled up in their minds; and writing provides the veritable platform on which to do so. Hence, writing, like music, is an escape from emotion for most people when they are alone, when the days are longer and the nights darker; when solitude leaves them bitter. They have more than enough to write once they are blown on all sides by the strong wind of hopelessness. Therefore, they have nothing else to do but remember. Remember the dark days
Their unvoiced wail is usually so intense such that their readers or listeners cannot help but hear it. Little wonder, then, that Paula is a pretty lengthy narrative filled with weariness and pain. It’s a combination of long periods of angry silence during the author’s childhood and adolescence.
In the long silent hours of writing, authors trample on memories; all that happened in one instant of their lives, as if their entire lives are a single, unfathomable image. The child, boy or girl they were, the woman or man they are, the old man or woman they shall be, are all water in the same rushing torrent. Their memories are like a Mexican Mural in which all times are simultaneous.
This is the way I have learnt to go. To either be like the novelist by putting my experience down on paper or singing. I have learnt to tread the path of the writer who, on the verge of breaking down, puts her feelings into writing.