Maryland's Day Of the Bulldozer
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Sunday, February 11, 2007
Traders weep helplessly as bulldozer pulls down illegal shops
By Grace Alegba
Blessing Eze, a widow and mother of five opened her shop at the Maryland bus stop in Lagos to resume business as usual on February 5. He did not know that her shop had been slated for demolition that day. She had hardly settled down to the day's business when the demolition team of Kick Against Indiscipline, KAI, arrived the shopping complex. Their mission was to demolish the shops at the bus stop. And by 11 a.m. the shops had all been pulled down. Eze told Newswatch amid tears that she was a widow saddled with the responsibility of bringing up her children. According to her, she has been coping with feeding her children only from the proceeds of the shop since she lost her husband.
Another grief-stricken woman who said she sold fish told Newswatch that KAI did not give them any advance notice. She said KAI officials came that morning and began to pull down shops and no reason was given for the demolition. If she had been warned in advance she would have looked for another shop. "Now that they have destroyed my shop, where would I start from?" She asked looking blank into the air.
When Newswatch visited the area, most of the traders were removing their wares from the rubbles. Some of the shop owners were busy removing some fittings they could salvage from the rubbles. Many of the women wept as they packed their wares.
Danjuma Maigari, senior special assistant to the governor on environmental matters and KAI countered claims by the traders that they were not served any notice at all. He said the traders were initially given a six-month notice, and a reminder after three months asking them to vacate the site before the demolition date. Apart from the "environmental nuisance" constituted by the shops, various petitions had been written in the past reporting dangerous activities such as armed robbery, hemp smoking, and several other social vices and the shops were used as covers. He noted that bag snatching in the early hours of the day and at night was the order of the day around the shops. According to him, the victims, mostly ladies, had lodged complains repeatedly to both the Ikeja and Onigbonbgo Police stations.
Traders whose shops suffered severe damage from the demolition admitted that the KAI demolition team was gentle on shops that paid their mandatory bribe of N1,000 while they mercilessly destroyed shops of those that did not comply. Maigari, however, said most of the shop owners had offered to pay KAI as much as N30,000 per shop to avert the demolition exercise but he insisted that the agency could not mortgage its conscience for money.
Maigari warned that KAI was going to be on the look out to ensure that the traders did not return to the area. Curiously, all the traders came back to their business posts the next morning to continue their various businesses. Some traders whose shops did not suffer much damage used the space to store their wares while they sold in front of their shops. One of them, a food seller, attended to her customers who sat comfortably to eat not minding the poor state of the environment.
The shop owners noted that the owners of the property behind the shops were the landowners who allocated spaces to them. After the demolition, the landlords were said to have gone for a meeting in which they agreed to meet with officials of KAI the following morning. Efforts to meet with the landlords were repudiated. Maigari, however, told Newswatch that the situation was a bad one because the shop owners could not produce the landlords that allocated the place to them. He lamented that it was pathetic that hoodlums allocated the land to them and also collected their rents. The landlords of the Mugambo estate adjacent to the shops tried to dislodge the traders because of their excesses but did not succeed.
Additional Reports by Roseline Ezomo
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