Armed police and government workers razed hundreds of houses in a downtown slum in Nigeria’s main city, forcing out hundreds of shocked residents to enforce a land ownership ruling, witnesses and officials said.
Churches, mosques and a health clinic were among the buildings destroyed last week when police, accompanied by workmen in a bulldozer, began smashing and burning wooden and concrete-brick houses in the downtown swampy Makoko-Ayetoro area of Lagos.
Surprised residents complained they were given no compensation, and were not allowed time to collect their belongings before police set their houses alight.
According to a Lagos state government housing official Denike Ogunbanke, a local land-owning family had asked the police to evict residents of the area after it won a court case in which it had been claiming ownership of the land, and thus the right to develop it.
Nigeria’s national police spokesperson was unavailable for comment.
However, Ogunbanke said on Friday she had not seen the court documents herself and a local rights group doubted there had been any judgement at all, alleging collusion between government officials and the family to sell off the land for an upscale housing project.
The destruction of the slum was the latest in a string of actions by security forces since the 1980s in Lagos, one of the world’s fastest growing cities with a population of 13-million.
Authorities say thousands of people, often from impoverished rural areas, move into Lagos each day in search of jobs, and attempts to rein in rapidly expanding, dirty slums often involve harsh methods.
In 1990, a large area of Lagos called Maroko was burnt down by security forces, making 300 000 people homeless.
Now living in a makeshift wooden shelter with his wife and five children, Seyi Einyongbagbe said he was given no notification before black-uniformed police armed with assault rifles stormed Makoko-Ayetoro on April 26, destroying his shop and six houses he owned there.
”I saw police coming with their bulldozer to destroy everywhere. They shot tear gas and fired guns” in the air, he said.
”So everybody began to run. Nobody could take anything from their homes.”
Einyongbagbe pointed to his former shop — now just a pile of wooden planks. Around him, pigs, cattle and goats rummaged among burnt-out corrugated metal roofs.
Nearby, the slum’s resident doctor, Haggai Powei, operates out of a house given over to him by a friend, caring for dozens of patients — some evicted by security forces just before his clinic was burnt down, others injured during the chaos as hundreds fled the scene.
”When the hospital was totally razed down … I was devastated,” said Powei, adding that he set the clinic up with the authorisation of the Lagos state government eight years ago.
Powei and others said a powerful local family which had been vying for years with other families and slum residents for control of Makoko-Ayetoro was behind the destruction.
Powei put the number of displaced at 2 000, although the activist, Felix Morka of the Social and Economic Rights Action Centre, put the figure as high as 10 000. – Sapa-AP