Demolish your problems

Last friday I was shocked to see that all the shops and shacks were gone from both sides of the Lekki expressway. And it wasn't like they had been carefully removed, they were now just piles of scrap lumber and rubble. A bulldozer had arrived and just started knocking everything down. The bike shop at the roundabout was gone, there was a pile of crumpled up bikes in the bushes away from the road. The decorative concrete place, which featured pillars for your house and statues for your garden and had an amazing sculptured doorway in the form of a lions mouth was just a pile of broken up concrete. A few shocked shop keepers picked disconsolently through the debris. The pet shop owner was sitting in shock with two puppies in cages that he had saved.

There have been been several such demolitions recently of areas deemed unmodern, for example the Oshodi market. Our state governor has stated his intention to clean up the city, but at what cost? Destroying poor peoples livelyhoods and housing? It seems most people think these actions are praiseworthy but I don't. You can read the governor's ideas here. The government talks about building new orderly markets but where are they? Everyone knew that those shops would have to go when the widening of the road got to that point, that's years away, couldn't that time have been used to do things in a better way?

Informal/casual trading is a key part in the process of bringing people into the economic system. For someone with little money, how can they get started? Only at the bottom, can they afford a market stall? What they can afford to do is to buy a big sack of potatoes, divide it into small bags and sell them on the street. That's how the street corner sellers near Goodies got started and now this is my favorite place to buy produce.

Isn't it better for these people to be selling potatoes rather than shaking down Okada riders or robbing truck drivers?

These problems can be handled in better ways. Like when the government cleared off Bar Beach for the breakwater project, there was an identified location for the traders to go to, and now that location near the Falamo bridge is a thriving market. In the recent events, the keepers of the demolished shops, left with nothing, have to fend for themselves.