Left behind by the megacity

 by SOLAADE AYO-ADERELE and BUKOLA ADEBAYO 

 

Left behind by the megacity

The Babatunde Fashola administration has always expressed its desire to turn Lagos State into a megacity. SOLAADE AYO-ADERELE and BUKOLA ADEBAYO report that heavily populated urban areas, characterised by substandard housing and squalor, have put a dent on the efforts, as these areas seem to have been forgotten in the scheme of things

The children of Pa Chinedu Matthew saw the other side of their residential area a fortnight ago. Their octogenarian patriarch had been sick and needed urgent medical attention.

However, while the family was determined to make whatever was left of his long life as comfortable as possible, the terrain they had to negotiate to get him to the hospital was as hostile as the conditions in the slum they live in.

The unusual rains of the past weeks did not help matters. On their return from one of his medical check-ups, the roads leading to the interior of Ayobo,  where they live,  had been flooded. They had to ferry the ailing old man through the water-logged terrain by strapping him to the back of one of his children.

The following day, 82-year-old Pa Matthew died of what his doctor said was stress as a result of what he experienced on the road the previous day.

About four decades ago, Pa Matthew had settled in Ayobo Town, which has now become a heavily populated suburb in Ayobo-Ipaja Local Council Development Area. He had done well for himself, as he owned a handful of landed property in the fast fading town.

However, when he settled in as a young man, Ayobo was a fast growing community, with prospects of becoming one of the small prosperous towns that Lagos, as a commercial city, could flaunt.

Gradually, his children recalled, the affordable price of land and accommodation in Ayobo led to the influx of a huge number of people. This soon started taking its toll on the environment, especially as a result of what residents describe as government neglect over the years.

As you drive to Ayobo from Church Bus Stop in Ipaja, you could see the neglect that the people complain about. Although new houses, banks and a modern market dot the route, the environment is largely dirty with bad roads, aging and crumbling structures — many of them constructed with mud, and others with corrugated iron sheets.

•Haphazard structures

Generally, it is doubtful if the Department of Physical Planning and Urban Development has a say in how houses are built here, what with the haphazard manner structures are sited, with many windows opening, literally, into other people’s bedrooms.

The environmental condition is appalling. Many houses lack toilet facilities, while those that have semblance of one have their wastes poured directly into the few available drainage outlets. Where there is no drainage system, the waste water flows on until it dries up along the line.

Sometime in 2011, the Lagos State Government initiated the road rehabilitation work between Ipaja and Ayobo, but as the project drags on, the road has become remarkably impassable, with the attendant hardship it foists on road users.

Not very far from Ayobo is Meiran, in Agbado/Oke-Odo Local Council Developmental Area. Like other slums in the ‘Centre of Excellence’, as Lagos is otherwise called, many houses are built close to one another and in an haphazard manner.

The earning capacity of most house owners in Meiran is not too difficult to guess, as a plot of land can accommodate up to about six structures, each of them constructed in the room-and-parlour format – plus one bathroom. Each of them houses families numbering, on the average, six.

There is no pipe-borne water; as a result, those who are able to sink boreholes retail water to less fortunate residents.

•Declining neighbourhoods

Though Ayobo and Meiran are backwater settlements, the giant stretch called Agege, another Lagos suburb, seems worse, as it seems to have become what the United Nations described as “declining” neighbourhoods, in which environmental conditions and services are in a process of seemingly inevitable decay.

Though it is a walking distance to Ikeja — the state capital and an industrial area — the core Agege seems to have remained stagnant in terms of backwardness. From Alfa Nla to Papa Ashafa, Dopemu, some parts of Mangoro, Orile, Agbotikuyo and others, the story is as bad.

In Alfa Nla, for instance, although there are many beautiful buildings, they exist side-by-side with decrepit structures. The streets run into one another in untidy manner, and some of them are breeding grounds for rodents and disease vectors like mosquitoes, rats and flies.

Here, too, the road project that has been under construction for over two years does not seem to have a completion date. The open canal that runs from the boundary between Alfa Nla and Okekoto streets has remained an eyesore for a long time, as it is filled with all sorts of debris, chief among which are ‘pure’ water bottles and nylon bags of all sizes.

Akerele Street in Agege may have become a no-go area for the sane. Though it has gradually degenerated into a market, it still hosts mainly old residential houses.

Alhaji Sani Bello, a tailor who maintains a shop on the street, says unless you know how to navigate the terrain, you are likely to be robbed in broad daylight by the many junkies who have found a home in the scandalous street.

A walk through Akerele is like passing through the biblical valley of the shadow of death. You are assailed with whiffs of Indian hemp which is smoked openly as if there is no law barring its possession, sale or consumption.

One of our correspondents witnessed a bizarre scene as she traversed the notorious street: A young man deftly passed an object to a wasted young man, who paid hurriedly before dashing to a corner to start sniffing the content of the silver wrapper he had been handed. The sniffing lasted a few minutes, after which he slumped, took a deep breath and got lost in reverie.

Bello said it was a scene residents were familiar with, as Akerele Street is known for all sorts of criminal misdemeanour.

A landlord who gave his name as Alhaji — refusing to provide a real name for fear of backlash — said though they had tried to dislodge the drug dealers, they soon realised the futility of their efforts, as the majority of the young men involved in the illicit trade were children of other landlords and can therefore not be prevented from living in the street where their parents own landed property.

•Weighed down by floods and debris

Awori Street in Dopemu area is an area below the sea level. Residents say they experience flooding whenever it rains. Here, the streets groan under the weight of debris that is washed there from adjoining slums; and people still inhabit structures that have caved in to the floods and vacated by their owners.

Still in Dopemu, Adesokan Street is another giant stretch of slum, with stagnant waters in the mosquito-breeding drainages. Routine garbage collection is lacking; as such, rubbish accumulates in huge quantities on the streets and stretches for miles.

Since the area is prone to severe flooding, most houses appear to be sinking — or, perhaps, sand-filled by their owners to window levels to beat flooding — as the windows are barely up to three feet above the ground.

Though all the aforementioned areas are in the heart of Agege Town, they look more like informal settlements.

•Lagos Island’s poor neighbourhoods

On Lagos Island, the characteristics of the landscapes in Ebute Elefun and Ilaje communities could best be summed up in one word: disturbing.

While areas such as parts of Oshodi, Surulere, Victoria Island and major roundabouts and underbridges have witnessed immense environmental turnaround, Ebute-Elefun is a thickly populated, run-down settlement lying close to the upwardly mobile Lagos Island but lacking civilisation.

Nude children run around bare-footed, as their lives seem to revolve around their ramshackle neighbourhood. They find ready ‘playground’ at Marwa Motor Park, and virtually every corner of the community is littered with gambling joints — veritable breeding grounds for criminals.

Though it has not rained for a week on the Lagos Island, the entire place seems to have been overlaid with thick black mud, as the ground is perpetually wet, perhaps due to the closeness to the coast.

Alhaji Hassan, a resident who took one of our correspondents round the neighbourhood on Wednesday morning, said though Ebute Elefun was one of the first communities on the Island, it was now the last to experience development.

The elderly man said living conditions in the community worsened every year, blaming the state government for excluding the area from the various urban planning projects.

Hassan said, “Every year, houses collapse or are washed away. About 20 homes collapsed overnight two weeks ago, but because we are not in Ikoyi, nobody heard about it; nobody came to visit or intervene. We pay our taxes. So, government should provide for us; but they only reconstruct highbrow areas. Many of us do not want to live here, but when you do not have enough money to rent a decent apartment in a safer area of the city, you come here.”

The houses in Ebute Elefun are also rented out to traders in Idumota, Obalende and Balogun areas for those looking for cheap and short stays. Landlords provide bed and breakfast for those looking for short stays on the Lagos Island.

Here, you can get a roof over your head for as little as N200 a day, as one of the caretakers in charge of leasing some rooms disclosed. Rent is usually between N100 per day and N1,500 per month. The reason is that most of the houses do not come with any social amenity like water, toilet or electricity.

•“We have no bathroom, potable water”

“We have no toilet or bathroom. Most people just come to sleep and spend the rest of the day at the market or their places of work. We have  just one bore-hole from which we get our water,”  Hassan further said.

The same applies to residents of Ilaje, an ethnic settlement in Ajah, some kilometres away from  the lagoon.

What greets you as you enter the neigbourhood is the stench of urine and decaying materials.  The rent, as with all slums, is cheap. A family living in one of the mud houses in the community pay N2,000 monthly, which seems expensive, considering the fact that there is nothing flattering about these shanties.

A resident, Nehemiah, who operates a computer centre in the community, said he had been living there for six years since he left Jos, Plateau State for Lagos due to the ethnic clashes.

According to him, when he got to Lagos, he had nowhere to stay. A friend loaned him N200 to rent a room in Ilaje.

Nehemiah, a university graduate, said he was considering relocating his business and family to Ibeju Lekki, as most of the houses in Ilaje are unfit for human habitation.

Ilaje is a community of fishermen, but apart from fishing, drinking bars and joints are the businesses that thrive in the area.

He said, “Smoking and drinking start as early as 7am. I want to move my business out of here because most of them do not believe in sending children to school.”

•No health care facility

As thickly populated as Ilaje is, it has no health centre. When residents need health care services, they travel to Ajah or Ibeju Lekki.

Nehemiah said, “Our women and children are suffering; there is no clinic in this community. Even the health centre in Ajah has no doctor; it has only a nurse and another health worker. They cannot take child delivery. Rather, pregnant women are always referred to Lagos Island, which is far from here.”

Nehemiah disclosed that the lack of health care facility cost him his second child.

He said, “My wife fell into labour in the night and I had to put her on a commercial motorcycle to Ajah. When we reached the clinic, there was no doctor, and the nurse on duty said she did not know what to do. She then advised us to go to Lagos Island Maternity. My wife could not walk, so we took another motorbike to Lagos Island. She started contracting on the way, and she gave birth before we reached the Island. But because there was no medical personnel around, the baby died immediately after delivery.”

Another resident, Cornelius, a Ghanaian, said houses in Ilaje did not come with toilet facilities.

He said, “You must learn how to hold yourself if you want to live here. It is common to see people waking up at night to go use the lagoon front. Those who cannot venture that far relieve themselves in front of other people’s houses. Children literally play in faeces, which litters everywhere.”

In general, many of the slum dwellers employ themselves in the informal economy, which include street vending, drug dealing, and prostitution. Many of them pick through the garbage heaps in search of items which they hawk for a living. Items of choice include empty beer and water bottles, as well as household electronics goods.

•United Nations report

According to the United Nations Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, about one third of all city dwellers live in slums. Its Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Mrs. Raquel Rolnik, noted that slums are usually characterised by urban decay, high rates of poverty, and unemployment.

“They are commonly seen as breeding grounds for social problems such as crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, high incidence of mental illness, and suicide. They also exhibit high incidence of disease due to inadequate access to safe water, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, lack of basic health care, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, and insecure residential status. Indeed, they are manifestation of urban poverty in developing world cities.”

This description fits all the slums that our correspondents visited.

In reaction, a construction expert and participant at a Lagos Housing Fair, Mr. Timothy Odeleye, said the problem was that when people were removed from slums and the place was rebuilt, former residents were almost always edged out, as their economic capability to afford an accommodation there was always dicey, while the government almost always develop interest in turning them into urban settlements, as was the case of Maroko.

“At the end of the day, the poor people move further to the interior to create new slums, thus creating an unending cycle of slum to urban, and back to slum,” Odeleye said.

•Official reactions

When contacted, the Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment, Mr. Tunji Bello, responding through the ministry’s Public Relations Officer, Mr. Fola Adeyemi, said the issue was beyond the purview of his ministry, and referred our correspondent to the Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development, Mr. Olutoyin Ayinde.

Ayinde neither picked his calls nor responded to the SMS sent to his GSM number.

Ditto the chairmen of the affected local council development authorities and local government areas.

These are Hon Augustine Arogun (Agbado Oke-Odo LCDA); Hon Shakiru Yusuf (Ayobo Ipaja LCDA); and Hon Ayodeji Abdulkareem (Agege LG).