In Nigeria, residents of Lagos watch helplessly as their neighborhood is razed

The load will be stored with one of his friends, at the opposite extreme of the megalopolis of 20 million inhabitants, where his wife and their two children have already found refuge.

He will spend the night on the ground, next to the rubble of the neighborhood's houses destroyed by order of the Lagos State government, because he cannot afford to pay for transportation to get to his nearby job every day.

For this 35-year-old public writer, it's a cold shower. “We were not warned of these demolitions, we find ourselves like refugees in our own country,” he laments, referring to the vast eviction operation launched since Monday by the local government to raze this neighborhood mainly made up of small cement shops. The operation could take several more days.

For the Lagos authorities, it is a question of making room to continue the construction of the 10-lane coastal mega-highway over 700 kilometers which is to link Lagos to the city of Calabar, at the eastern end of the country.

“We need to regenerate the city” and put an end to “these illegal structures,” Kunle Adeshina, spokesperson for the Lagos State Minister of the Environment, told AFP.

“On Tuesday, seven people were arrested with weapons in this neighborhood, the state cannot authorize criminals,” he adds.

With more than 20 million inhabitants, Lagos is neck and neck with Kinshasa for the title of most populous city in Africa.

While it only had 200.000 inhabitants in the 1960s, its demographic dynamism could cause it to become the most populous city in the world by 2100, according to projections from the NGO Climate Central.

But while residents of houses along the highway route had been informed of their imminent destruction, the diggers' penetration into the neighborhood took several thousand families by surprise.

In the middle of the rubble, men pull from the rubble what scrap metal they can find to resell for a few pennies later, women with children wait near the hastily packed suitcases while a few vehicles loaded to the brim make their way through. in clouds of dust.

“Nowhere to go”

Blessing John, a 35-year-old mother, wipes away tears as she tries to carry an old foam mattress on which she will spend the night, despite being nine months pregnant and due to give birth.

Many of them don't know where to go.

“We will sleep here, on the ground, until we manage to raise the money to go to our home state of Ebonyi,” explains Peter Nwakpa Chinedu next to the excavator in action which has just reduced to ruins his house where he lived with 10 members of his family.

Many residents of the neighborhood were relocated here by local authorities after the Maroko neighborhood, a few kilometers to the west, was evicted in 1990.

The Lagos government then granted them title deeds for apartments in buildings that were never completed. Also, many people have built small cement houses next to these unfinished buildings.

This is the second time in 34 years that Omolola Adekule, 68, has witnessed the demolition of her house. “They destroyed my house in Maroko, they destroyed my house here, I feel bad, my blood pressure is high, I have nowhere to go except the street,” she laments, looking dejected.

The last major eviction in Lagos dates back to 2020, when the army chased tens of thousands of residents from Tarkwa Bay beach to protect the national company's oil infrastructure, victims of vandalism, according to the authorities.

“We heard rumors, we weren’t sure,” says Ena Patrick, 48, a teacher whose local school was razed. “Why now? When everything is so expensive, eating is a problem and so many families are already suffering,” she gets angry.

Nigeria has been experiencing a deep economic crisis since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power in May, with inflation close to 30% in January year-on-year and millions of Nigerians no longer having enough to eat.