No place for the poor

[Grant]

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Common man pushed out of urban dream
Blue-collar living not in Nigerian city's master plan
- Lydia Polgreen, New York Times
Sunday, December 17, 2006


(12-17) 04:00 PST Abuja, Nigeria -- The license plates here supposedly say it all: Abuja is "the Center of Unity."

A massive mosque, golden dome glinting amid four minarets, sits on one side of town, representing Nigeria's population of 65 million Muslims. An equally vast nondenominational church, with copper-plated flying buttresses soaring skyward, sits less than a mile away, representing a roughly equal number of Christians.

Each of Nigeria's 36 states, representing the hundreds of dialects and ethnics groups in this fractious nation, has its own office tower here, every one trying to outdo the rest in plush fittings.

But these days the deepest cleavage in Nigerian society yawns wider here than it does almost anywhere else -- the chasm between the tiny, rich and powerful elite and the vast, impoverished majority of the nation's 130 million people.

"They don't want to see the common man, the poor man," said Comrade Daniel, a motorcycle taxi driver, standing in the rubble of his neighborhood. He lost first his home and then his livelihood to a recent campaign to rid this stately capital of the blemishes of poverty. "They only care for themselves," he said.

Daniel and others who live on the unruly edge of this tidy city in the mossy hills of central Nigeria say that Abuja has declared war on its poorest citizens.

In the interest of cultivating an image as a world-class city, comparable to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong, the government has been razing unauthorized and unsightly slums, clearing out street hawkers and banishing popular and cheap motorcycle taxis, all in the name of spiffing up the city.

Abuja is a planned city, originally designed by a group of American firms in the 1970s. It was meant to present an orderly gloss on Nigeria's vibrant but chaotic reputation. No place represents that image more fully than Lagos, the former capital, with its legendary go-slows, or traffic jams, jumbles of shacks next to office towers and streets overflowing with garbage and sewage.

Abuja, by contrast, was to have none of those problems.

The orderly master plan would ensure that Abuja would be a tranquil oasis in the center of a cacophonous, polyglot nation.

Even its location would bring harmony -- it was built in the middle of the country, roughly equidistant from the Yoruba heartland in the southwest, Ibo strongholds in the east and the largely Hausa north.

It would reflect the boundless potential of this economic and political giant -- Nigeria is Africa's top oil exporter and its most populous nation.

But the city's master plan was ignored for years by corrupt officials who allowed illegal neighborhoods to blossom, unauthorized street markets to spread and torpedo-like motorcycle taxis, called okada, often driven by illiterate young men, to choke the streets.

Much of that expansion was sanctioned -- or at least overlooked -- by the rulers of the day, and deeds were obtained by many of those who have lost their homes in the recent cleanup. Daniel, the motorcycle taxi driver, had a deed to his land, having paid about $160 for a small plot.

In 2003, a new minister was appointed to run the capital, and he declared his intention to hew strictly to the old master plan. Many political leaders cheered the decision, fretting that Abuja, built at enormous expense as an antidote to Lagos, was headed to the same chaotic fate.

But the declaration effectively rendered much of the daily life of millions of people illegal. As with most Africans, Nigerians deal mostly in the informal economy, the vast, unregulated, untaxed network that emerges, through the inexorable logic of the marketplace, to fill vital needs left unmet by government and the formal economy.

And so while some buildings belonging to wealthy businesses and individuals were destroyed, the primary victims have been people like Daniel, 31.

He migrated to Abuja a decade ago from the impoverished northern state of Kaduna, drawn by the glittering wealth. He found work as a security guard, but lost it when the company lost its contract.

Unable to find salaried work, he bought a Chinese-made motorcycle and started working as a motorcycle taxi driver, picking up nickel and dime fares around the capital.

On most weekdays he could pull in $20, not bad in a country where 60 percent of people are in poverty. He built a house off a rutted dirt road carved, illegally, along the manicured highway leading to the airport, and saw such a bright future here that he invited his younger sister, Vashti, to live with him and try her luck.

Vashti arrived with a diploma in business and management from a technical college, but months of searching yielded no work, so she bought a cell phone and sells calls to people too poor to buy a phone. Still, business is way down because most of her customers' homes have been destroyed.

"I came here in search of greener pastures," Vashti Daniel said. "But up to this day I have not found them."

The master plan's housing estates unfurl with the orderliness of a planned subdivision: townhouses and apartments for the well-heeled, tract homes and villas for the even-better-heeled. But there is little provision for the army of civil servants, whose low wages place the graceful homes of Abuja out of reach.

As for the maids, drivers, security guards and laborers without whom this city would cease to function -- people like Daniel and his sister -- there is no place for them at all. Many have moved farther still, commuting for hours from neighboring states to escape the bulldozers.

The government has said it plans to help resettle those displaced by the demolition, estimated to be in the tens of thousands, but those who have lost their homes say no one has offered them any compensation or a new place to live. And so they are left with the bitter knowledge that their capital has no place for them.

With their home reduced to rubble, Vashti and Comrade Daniel have moved into the back room of a cousin's house. The house they lost was not some tin shack, but a proper house of bricks and mortar. Daniel's income has been slashed by two-thirds by the ban on okada, and he does not know how he will rebuild.

"They say they want to make Abuja like London, but London wasn't built in a day," he said. "Once upon a time they had poor people in London, but they developed themselves. We just want that chance."

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