Lagos evicts 9000 residents, to build 1000 luxury Units in its place.

Thousands of Lagosians who lived in the Badia East area which fronts the scenic Gulf of Guinea, have forcefully become homeless after their devastating evictions in February on short notice. Local officials in Lagos, who accepted a $200 million loan from the World Bank to “increase sustainable access to basic urban services,” are instead creating an unaffordable complex of 1,000 luxury units on the grounds.

This information follows from a recent report by Amnesty International in cooperation with the Nigerian Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC). Self-built homes were bulldozed and the residents were pushed to sleep outside or under a bridge. Nearly 9,000 residents of Badia East lost their homes, Amnesty International reports in a press release.


"The effects of February's forced eviction have been devastating for the Badia East community where dozens are still sleeping out in the open or under a nearby bridge exposed to rain, mosquitos and at risk of physical attack."

Earning about $100 per month, “there’s not a chance“ that the residents of Badia will be able to afford a new housing after being pushed into homelessness, said SERAC’s executive director Felix Morka.

Lagos officials provide a different perspective
The Lagos state commissioner for housing, Adedeji Olatubosun Jeje provided an opposite perspective on the events in an interview with the New York Times:
“It’s a regeneration of a slum,” he official said. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties. Nobody was even living in those shanties. Maybe we had a couple of squatters living there.”
Similarly, the Lagos state Attorney-General claimed they were merely clearing empty land: “It was just a rubbish dump,” he said.

Not the first case of eviction in Lagos
This is not the first time the Lagos government diverted money allotted to improve life for the large riverine community. Since the early 1990s on, grants from World Bank for ‘slum clearance’ have often become a motive for the mass eviction of area residents without providing an alternative shelter. In 1997, more evictions were ordered for nearly 2,000 residents who were chased off by armed guards from even attempts to rescue their belongings.

Another round of demolitions started in 2003 following a 48 hour notice.This attempt was stopped midway by non-violent resistance. However, the evictions resumed again in October 2003. About 3,000 residents of Oke Ilu-Eri were left without compensation or replacement homes. Again in March 2013, hundreds of homes were demolished by the ‘Kick Against Indiscipline’ brigade.
Amnesty and SERAC are calling on the governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, to publicly commit to stopping forced evictions, and on the World Bank to put safeguards in place to ensure it does not support any activities which may result in forced evictions in the future.

“The Lagos state government has failed to comply with national and international law. It is high time that the Lagos state government and the Nigerian government stop forced evictions and enact legal safeguards that apply to all evictions,” said Amnesty's Oluwatosin Popoola.

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