Lagos authorities demolish Otumara, leave hundreds homeless

Bulldozers tore through homes in Lagos’s working-class Otumara neighbourhood Friday, leaving hundreds of families homeless as Nigerian authorities demolish slums over land disputes and campaigns to sharpen the mega-city’s image.

“They took us by surprise, and I don’t even know where to go now,” said resident Victoria Ajah, who was only given 30 minutes to grab all of her belongings.

The evictions were enforced not just by excavators but also by unidentified men claiming to act as security, who threatened journalists at the scene as well, including those from AFP.

The demolitions in Otumara are just the latest to hit informal settlements, working-class neighbourhoods and slums in Nigeria’s sprawling economic capital — a city awash with oil money and a class of super-rich competing for increasingly limited space with the rest of its estimated 20 million residents.

“A powerful family with links to Lagos State wants to take this land. I don’t know the reason,” said Megan Chapman, co-director of the NGO Justice and Empowerment Initiatives.

The Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency did not respond to a request for comment.

– Court order –

The evictions happened despite a 2017 court order suspending a development project in the area, citing the lack of a solution for local residents, according to a legal ruling seen by AFP.

People living in Otumara, along with those from a dozen other nearby communities, had brought a lawsuit against Lagos State the previous year after they were threatened with eviction.

“The Respondents are hereby restrained from further attempts to forcibly evict the Applicants yet to be evicted from their respective locations,” the judge in the case wrote.

The ruling called for Lagos State to hold consultations on “how best to seamlessly relocate” people living there.

Despite the ruling, the state has overseen a slew of demolitions across Lagos in recent months without residents being informed ahead of time.

“This destruction is a violation of the law and the verdict handed down by the Lagos High Court,” Chapman said.

A lack of clear land ownership in some cases, and alleged corruption in others, has for years made housing precarious in the city’s poorer areas, where residents lack the money or political clout to fight developers.

Adding to the problem, Lagos’s constant growth, the country’s broader economic crisis and a boom in construction of luxury apartments have led rents to skyrocket, especially as some landlords look for richer renters who earn their salaries in more stable US dollars.

Otumara, located on the city’s sprawling mainland, is a particularly coveted area because of its proximity to Lagos’s richer island neighbourhoods.

Never having received a date for their eviction, residents had been living in fear and rumours of impending destruction for years.

“People have nowhere else to go. Most of them were born and raised here. Others came to Lagos years ago to live here. I don’t know what we will become,” Ajah said.

In September last year, the nearby neighbourhood of Oko Baba Sawmill was also demolished.

Other communities, like Makoko, whose houses on stilts over the Lagos lagoon have earned it the fascination of tourists and foreign journalists, also live under the constant threat of demolition.