The litter-strewn streets of Africa’s largest and arguably dirtiest city woke up to a new broom on Monday, as Lagos’s latest uniformed enforcement squad launched a mammoth clean-up mission.
As dawn rose over the rusting, beached cargo ships lining the harbour front and Marina Street’s raucous traffic jams, officers in crisp, new lemon-yellow uniforms and polished military jackboots fanned out through the crowds.
Their mission: to bring a little order to a sprawling metropolis where more than 13-million people jostle to make a living among the open sewers, pot-holed roads and teeming, lawless slums of a once-great capital.
This week they are on a mission to introduce themselves to the city as the KAI brigade, from ”Kick Against Indiscipline”, the motto of a zero tolerance-style campaign to intimidate Lagosians into mending their unruly ways. From next week the squads will be backed up by heavily armed cops and a fleet of mobile courtrooms, ready to slap on-the-spot fines on litter bugs, spitters, street hawkers, jay walkers and public defecators.
But they will also have to confront the famously independent spirit of those who somehow manage to eke out a living among the chaos.
”You will draw the wrath of God if you dare mishandle me,” shrieked a beggar, crippled by polio and squatting on a skateboard, as he lashed out at officers attempting to stop him seeking handouts amid Marina’s dense traffic.
As 500 KAI enforcers poured into the streets, one of them, Jide Oladosu, said: ”What we are doing this week is to sensitise members of the public on the existence of KAI and offences that attract punishment under it.”
From next week the new force will be empowered to hand out fines to individuals ranging from 1 000 to 10 000 naira, more than a month’s wages for many in Lagos’s toiling underclass.
Businesses, churches and corporate bodies could face fines of between 2 000 and 100 000 naira ($750) if they are caught breaching the terms of a 2001 sanitation and environmental law, officials said. On Monday, however, in the absence of the anticipated fleet of mobile courtrooms, some KAI officers were already meting out justice, capturing offenders and forcing them to perform humiliating ”frog jumps” on the roadside.
Meanwhile, illegal street stalls and other structures were torn down.
Many expect that, like the police before them, the officers of the brigade will eventually abuse their broad powers to shake down Lagosians for bribes.
”The law is good if it can be faithfully implemented. It will restore the beauty of Lagos,” said journalist Abdul Kamal.
But Tinu Akadiri, a market woman, was dubious: ”KAI could be an avenue to enrich the so-called enforcer.”
Others clearly feel they are above any law that mankind could enforce.
A pastor wearing a cassock who was arrested while trying to cross the highway at first pleaded for clemency, then threatened to use the Holy Bible to curse anyone who dared cause him ”public embarrassment”.
The new squad is no respecter of rank. As AFP followed the first patrols they stopped and reprimanded a senior naval officer driving on the wrong side of the road, a common tactic to beat the city’s jams.
KAI’s tactics are draconian, but the task is monumental. Despite losing its role as Nigeria’s capital to Abuja almost 12 years ago, Lagos has continued to attract immigrants from across west Africa. The UN Population Fund believes it could be the world’s third biggest city, with more than 25-million people, by 2025. Already
public services are breaking down, traffic is gridlocked and crime and disease are rampant.
Faced with such challenges, Lagos’s Governor Bola Tinubu and his environment commissioner Tunji Bello have sought inspiration in the tactics of one of Nigeria’s most notorious military dictators, General Muhammadu Buhari. The retired general failed this year in an attempt to recycle himself as a civilian ruler when he lost the presidential election, but the spirit of his 1984 War Against Indiscipline (WAI) lives on in the KAI.
Bello denied that the new deployment marked a return to Nigeria’s bad old days of military repression.
”We are not going to use military diktat. We are in a democracy. But we combine the use of persuasion and sometimes, force, to achieve our goal,” he said.
Offenders will have the option of appealing their fines at regular courts, and anyone unable to pay a fine imposed by a mobile court may be made to work on state projects ”to teach him a lesson,” he said. – Sapa-AFP