Untold hardship on women resulting from demolitions in Abuja

In an article prepared for the WATCH project being implemented by MIND, which focuses on gender and urban poverty in Abuja, WATCH highlights the adverse effect melted down on non-indigenes of Abuja, laying emphasis on the female gender, as drive was renewed to restore the original master plan of Nigeria’s capital territory.

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In one of the numerous shanty homes dotting Kuchigoro village in Abuja lives Mercy and her family. After their home was demolished in September 2006, the mother of five said they have struggled to get a decent housing ever since.

“With the small money we had left, we went to Gwagwalada (a suburb of Abuja) but it was not convenient so we came back to Kuchigoro,” said Mercy.

Her home was among many others demolished by the government nine years ago, in a renewed drive to restore the original master plan of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city.

The Abuja Master Plan officially came to existence in 1979. Part of the plan was to resettle indigenous people that inhabited the space that would now become Nigeria’s capital city in 1991.

The Nigerian government, however, did not go through with its resettlement after finding it cumbersome and decided to allow the Abuja natives remain in their settlement. The settlement expanded as the indigenous people sold or rented lands and houses to people who moved to the city from other parts of Nigeria and could not afford the expensive houses in the formal market.

But since 2003, the Abuja Ministers have repeatedly destroyed homes they claim violated the master plan. Thousands of home in settlements like Kuchigoro have been flattened in the last decade, leaving people like Mercy, homeless, scraping for a living and feeling despondent.

“Till today, I am still sad. I have not recovered. My husband has started his taxi business again, but I don’t have money for any shop, so my children and I are suffering”.

The Federal Capital Development Authority, according to Mercy, gave the Kuchigoro residents no prior warning of the demolition.

The demolition occurred while Mercy’s husband, a cab driver, was away for his business. She watched helplessly as her home and her stall were razed with everything in it.

The demolition not only left her family homeless, it also took away Mercy’s only means of livelihood – a grocery stall – as bulldozers and backhoes rolled into Kuchigoro and levelled homes, shops, and churches mostly on non-indigenes.

Mercy and her husband, in search of the proverbial Golden Fleece, had separately moved to the Abuja from the Eastern part of Nigeria –Anambra, after the city was made Nigeria’s capital.

Unfavourable policy

Mercy and her husband got no compensation after their house was demolished neither were they entitled to automatic relocation. Unlike indigenes who, although would face the harrowing experience of demolition including a sense of loss of the socio-cultural deprivation, would be provided formal housing at ‘resettlement’ sites, non – indigenes or migrants do not exactly have rights within the city.

The Abuja development authority treats the indigenes and non-indigenes differently and demolitions generally target houses that non-indigenes live in.

According Nosike Ogbuenyi, the spokesperson of the Minister of Abuja, Bala, Mohammed, the Abuja authorities will not….Click here for full story

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