Makoko is the perfect nightmare for the Lagos government – a slum in full view, spread out beneath the most travelled bridge in west Africa’s megalopolis. Yet this city on stilts, whose residents live under the constant threat of eviction, has much to teach

by Tolu Ogunlesi

“One bucket, one life,” says Ojo, puffing on a marijuana rollup. We have stopped by the Floating School, a two-storey solar-powered wooden structure that floats on the Lagos lagoon on a bed of plastic barrels. I ask him to explain what he means. It’s the young fisherman’s way of summing up the dangerous exertion that is his part-time vocation: sand dredging off the coast of Makoko, the world’s biggest floating city.

The dredgers, he explains, descend a wooden ladder into the depths of the lagoon, armed with only a bucket and the will to live. The depths to which they go mean total submersion. Then they have to climb out with a sand-laden bucket that will be emptied on to the floor of a boat. When the boat is piled high with wet sand – high enough so that it’s on the verge of sinking – it sails to shore, from where the sand is loaded on to trucks, for delivery to building sites around the city.

On this, my fourth visit, Makoko is as I’ve always known it: the tiny “jetty” from which visitors and residents board dugout canoes into the labyrinths of the floating settlement; the grey-black sludge that passes for lagoon water; the tangle of boats impatiently slithering through the labyrinth of waterways, making the traffic of Makoko reminiscent of the notorious Lagos roads. Then there’s the hustle and bustle of human activity: women smoking fish or peddling food and bric-a-brac; half-naked children rowing their own boats or playing on the verandas of the wooden shacks; congregants in white garments, singing and dancing in impromptu churches on boats.

Makoko is also the perfect nightmare for the state government – a slum in full view, spread out beneath the most travelled bridge in west Africa’s largest city. Everyone who flies into Lagos to do business on the Islands is likely to find themselves passing over the Third Mainland Bridge. For a city keen to re-create itself as forward-looking, Makoko is a dismal advertisement, and the government knows this. It is, therefore, ever keen to pursue the seemingly easiest solution to this “embarrassment”.

Some 2,000 people a day enter Lagos, many ending up in settlements like Makoko
On 16 July 2012, four days after the State Ministry of Waterfront Infrastructure Development issued a 72-hour quit notice to residents, a band of machete-wielding men laid siege to Makoko’s buildings. Five days later, according to the Social and Economic Action Rights Centre (Serac, a legal advocacy group for underprivileged Nigerian communities threatened with forced evictions), the assault escalated: the demolition workers set fire to targeted structures and deployed armed police who allegedly fired gunshots indiscriminately. One resident was killed, shaming the demolition workers into suspending their efforts. By then, 30,000 people had been rendered homeless.

Makoko
Makoko was founded as a fishing village in the 19th century. Photograph: Andrew Esiebo for the Guardian
An estimated 2,000 people enter Lagos every day, many ending up in informal settlements like Makoko. It was founded as a fishing village in the late 19th century, by immigrants from the Egun ethnic group. As its population swelled and land ran out, they moved on to the water. Today Makoko is home to people from a variety of riverine communities along Nigeria’s coast.

Continue reading here;

http://nkiruhomann.com/2016/02/29/inside-makoko-danger-and-ingenuity-in-the-worlds-biggest-floating-slum/

We can't do without places like this in a developing country like Nigeria or is their any resettlement plan for them