thegoodjoehunt:

Then people from other States gets kicked out from the same state. It is a pity what is going on. Now Nigerians are facing Ghana must go from Lagos.

thegoodjoehunt:

Why won't you abuse thNiger Delta people forgetting they have gone through pains for this nation to stand. The air pollution from gas flaring makes the brains and lungs of kids in those regions be like that of chronic smokers. They drink water polluted with dangerous chemicals and yet not even pipe water to drink or light for a bit of convenience.

While funds were diverted to Lagos and Abuja for larvish development. Then you spit on them and call their place a sh**hole.

If you like deport more people and forget they also served Lagos and the country.

TouchDown:

Hilarious. Comparing destitutes with people with corporate jobs in private institutions. By the way, for as long as I can remember, many Niger-deltans have been demanding this but nothing has changed because its stupid.

You know, its amusing the uproar that greeted this action by the LASG by the Igbos while we didn't hear much when Abia sacked Imo workers in its employment. Same Igbos on nairaland that were gloating when destitute non-lagosian Yorubas and Hausas got "re-united" with their kith and kin... SMH

thegoodjoehunt:

You can laugh but the fact is Lagos was the capital of Nigeria for long and gained lots of devlopment from the Oil revenue. Same with Abuja. While the Niger Delta was left to perish. It is a fact. People at the creeks where petroleum production see hell.

manny4life:


As much as it a real pity, this is one of few times I blame GEJ really badly for not using his executive authority.

TouchDown:

Let's assume all what you have up here is 100% true.

I really feel for the poor inhabitants of the delta. Really. But now we have a President from the delta, a petroleum minister from the delta and many other important ministers from the delta. By 2015 or 2019, especially with the arrogance of the political class and their militants, what would be the excuse if these issues remain unsolved?

bittyend:

Read carefully:

I said: LEAVE that GOD FORSAKEN SHYTEHOLE.

What's the correlation between 'LEAVE' and 'GOD FORSAKEN SHYTEHOLE', and Niger Delta?

Care to explain?

thegoodjoehunt:

Their issues can never be solved if the priorities of development lies in the mega cities. Look at GEJ's plans for the Chinese loans. Nothing is there for those in the creeks. It is not just the creeks but rural development and as the Niger Delta resources are shared and enjoyed by Nigerians, the luxury, opportunities and conveniences of the major cities should be shared by Nigerians.

TheBookWorm: This is actually happens in the US as well.

I remember when Mayor Bloomberg of New York City created a program for homeless people, in which they could get a one way ticket anywhere.

Mayor Defends One-Way Tickets for Homeless

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/mayor-defends-one-way-tickets-for-homeless/?_r=0

Prof Corruption:

This is Lagos, not New York.

TheBookWorm:

And your point? This is for people who say that this does not happen in other countries.

Mayor Defends One-Way Tickets for Homeless
By JULIE BOSMAN and MICHAEL BARBARO
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended a city program to send homeless families out of New York on planes, trains and buses on Wednesday, saying it “saves the taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money.”

Speaking in the Blue Room in City Hall to announce a new finance commissioner, Mr. Bloomberg was asked if the program simply shifts the homelessness program to a different place, as some critics of the program have suggested.

“I don’t know, when they get to the other places, whether they find jobs,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It may be an easier place for them. If we don’t — we either have two choices. We can do this program or pay an enormous amount of money daily to provide housing.”

It costs the city about $36,000 a year to provide shelter for a homeless family. The average stay in shelter is about nine months.

But Mr. Bloomberg appeared sensitive to the image of flying homeless families to far-flung places, as the program is set up to do. In the past two years, families have been provided one-way tickets to Haiti, Peru, Mexico City, St. Croix, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, Santo Domingo and Casablanca. (The most popular destinations are Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.)

“The average cost is trivial,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Most go by bus. Very few go overseas, very few go long distances. Bus is the normal ways we pay for transportation, rather than air.”

In fact, the most common mode of travel for families in the program is air, not bus. Forty-eight percent travel by airplane; 37 percent by bus; and 15 percent by train, according to city data.

TheBookWorm: This is actually happens in the US as well.

I remember when Mayor Bloomberg of New York City created a program for homeless people, in which they could get a one way ticket anywhere.

Mayor Defends One-Way Tickets for Homeless

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/mayor-defends-one-way-tickets-for-homeless/?_r=0

manny4life:

There's no where in that article it says they were forced or pressed, better yet, those under age 18, they had to reunite them with family members.... TRY AGAIN.

They are flown to Paris ($6,332), Orlando ($858.40), Johannesburg ($2,550.70), or most frequently, San Juan ($484.20).

Enlarge This Image

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Hector Correa and Elisabeth Mojica were at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday to fly home to Puerto Rico, to stay with her father.
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Outward Bound
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Outward Bound
Enlarge This Image

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, with Inez, returned to North Carolina after only a few days when relatives paid their back rent.
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They are not executives on business trips or couples on honeymoons. Rather, all are families who have ended up homeless, and all the plane tickets are courtesy of the city of New York (one-way).

The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007, as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.

Many of them are longtime New Yorkers who have come upon hard times, arrive at the shelter’s doorstep and jump at the offer to move at no cost. Others are recent arrivals who are happy to return home after becoming discouraged by the city’s noise, the mazelike subway, the difficult job market or the high cost of housing.

“I didn’t expect the city to be the way it is,” said Hector Correa, who was in a homeless shelter last week and flew home to Puerto Rico on Tuesday. “I was expecting something different, something better.”

Mr. Correa and his companion, Elisabeth Mojica, and their two young sons, both also named Hector, arrived in New York in May to live with his mother. But after they failed to find jobs and the bills began to mount, his mother threatened to kick them out. Out of cash, they checked into the city intake center for homeless families in the Bronx.

“The person I spoke to in the shelter informed me that if I have a person I could stay with in Puerto Rico, that I could get help to go,” said Mr. Correa, who worked as a mechanic in Carolina, on the north shore of the island. They will stay with Ms. Mojica’s father. “I feel very happy because I’m going to be able to get back to do the things that I know how to do,” he said.

At the intake center, social workers ask families about their housing options in other places. If a family says that they have relatives who might be willing to take them in, and social workers confirm their report, the family could be on a plane, bus or train within hours, although the city will sometimes wait a few days to avoid the expense of last-minute fares. The Correas flew to San Juan for less than $1,000.

The city, which spends $500,000 a year on the program, employs a local travel agency, Austin Travel, to book one-way tickets for domestic trips. Department of Homeless Services employees do all the planning for international travel.

[size=16pt]City officials said there were no limits on where a family can be sent, and families can reject the offer and stay in city shelters. So far, families have been sent to 24 states and 5 continents, most often to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
[/size]
“We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance,” said Vida Chavez-Downes, the director of the Resource Room, a city office with 11 social workers, two managers and an administrative assistant who help relocate families. “We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go. Anyone who comes through our door.”

One family with 10 children accepted an offer to go to Puerto Rico on a nonstop JetBlue flight. An adventurous but ultimately unlucky Michigan couple drove to the city in search of jobs and a new life. They got $400 in gas cards to drive back.

One set of parents agreed to move to France with their three children to be with the mother’s family. The $6,332 travel cost included five plane tickets to Paris and five train tickets to the town of Granville, in the northwest.

In the past, the city contracted with the Salvation Army for a now-defunct program called Homeward Bound, but only for single adults and couples, not families with children. Both versions followed the example of Travelers Aid, a 150-year-old nonprofit organization that provides stranded and homeless people emergency aid so they could return to their homes, and which still exists today. Other cities have experimented with similar programs, but they are largely focused on adults without children.

The Hawaii Legislature recently rejected a plan to send homeless people on one-way flights to live with relatives on the mainland, because of the cost.

[size=16pt]Once a family leaves New York, homeless services officials say they follow up with a phone call to make sure they arrive safely, then make a few more calls over the next two to three weeks. In rare cases, they will advance the family up to four months’ rent, a one-month security deposit, a furniture allowance and a broker’s fee.
[/size]
City officials said that none of the families that have been relocated have returned to city shelters.

The program fails to address the underlying problems that brought the families here in the first place, said Arnold S. Cohen, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for the Homeless, an advocacy group in New York.

“The city is engaged in cosmetics,” Mr. Cohen said. “What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless.”

Sometimes the journey to and from New York is quick. Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, both 20, owed back rent on their apartment in Fayetteville, N.C., so they came to New York on Saturday with their 5-month-old, Inez. They planned to stay in shelters while they looked for jobs, and went straight to the intake center.

Then relatives of Mr. Little, who worked at a telephone center serving insurance customers, scraped up enough money to pay their back rent, and homeless services workers confirmed that his mother would be around to help. By Monday night, they were waiting outside Gate 73 at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to board their 7:15 p.m. Greyhound to Greensboro.

“We were going to come here and then find work, you know, because there’s always work in New York,” Ms. Martin said, as Inez bounced on her knee.

Mr. Little said, “Once we found out we could keep our apartment, there was no point in staying here, because I can go back to my job in North Carolina.”

naptu2: LAGOS IN THE 1800s

During the 1850s there was a large influx into Lagos of educated Africans, who had earlier been sold as slaves, from Sierra Leone, Brazil and Cuba. Their return profoundly affected the history of Lagos. The Sierra Leonians were known as Akus or Saros, the Brazilians and Cubans as Agudas. The Agudas were mainly Catholics, skilled artisans and craftmen who had purchased their freedom and returned home to their “country” of origin. The Akus or Saros were slaves (or descendants of slaves) rescued by the British naval squadron that patrolled the high seas on the look-out for slavers. The Saro émigrés were mainly missionaries (Protestants), teachers, clerks, or traders. All of the returned émigrés had their homes in one of the hinterland kingdoms – Ijebu, Egba, Ekiti, Oyo-Ibadan, Nupe. Most were probably shipped from Lagos, but none seemed to have been Lagosians.

The composition of populations in Lagos in the 1880s was as follows: Brazilians 3,220, Sierra Leonians 1,533 and Europeans 111, out of a population of 37,458. of all the population 30 ½ per cent (11,049) were engaged in commerce as merchants, traders, agents, clerks and shopmen, 5,173 were tradesmen, mechanics, manufacturers and artisans; 1,414 were farmers and agricultural labourers. In 1871 only 9 2/3 per cent of the population were in commerce, 5 per cent in agriculture. In 1881 the percentage of agricultural workers dropped to 3 ¾ while that of commercial workers jumped to 30 ½. Lagos was therefore predominantly a commercial city. Most of the population was animist in 1868, 14,797 as opposed to 8,422 Muslims and 3,970 Christians.

In the 1880s there were four distinct groups in Lagos – the Europeans, the educated Africans (Saros), the Brazilians and the indigenes. The town was physically divided into four quarters corresponding to these groups. The Europeans lived on the Marina, the Saros mainly west of the Europeans in an area called Olowogbowo, the Brazilians behind the Europeans – their quarter was known as Portuguese Town or Popo Aguda or Popo Maro – and the indigenes on the rest of the island – behind all three.

The Saros were culturally closer to the Europeans than to either of the other two groups. The top social class of Lagos of the 1880s was dominated by the Europeans – merchants, missionaries, civil servants. The Saros tried to gain admission into this class. The criteria for membership were education and wealth. In this sense, the educated elite, both black and white, could be considered as members of the same social group. They lived like Victorian gentlemen, entertainment consisting of numerous ‘conversaziones’, ‘soirees’, ‘levees’, ‘at homes’, ‘tea fights’ and concerts of the works of Bach, Beethoven, Handel and so on. The press had music critics; one irate critic lamented that concerts had fallen to the level of music-hall entertainment. Christmas was a season of Victorian festivities. As one newspaper editor enthused “Balls are announced and concerts and athletic sports, dinners, with the accessories of plump turkeys, minced pies, plum puddings and Christmas trees. Fineries of all sorts and conditions. All the elite seemed to lack was snow. Their dressing and eating habits were predictably Victorian. Most of them were profuse in their loyalty to the queen. In 1881 the Lagos Times prayed for the success of British arms in Ashanti. It declared: “we are so jealous of the Power of British arms that we would not have it suffer the slightest reverse.” The Imperial Federation League found enthusiastic support in Lagos. Several prominent Saros, J.A.O Payne, J.J Thomas and S.J. George came to Britain for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1887 at their own expense.

Life styles among the indigenes continued as before. They ate the normal Yoruba dishes of maize, cassava, yams and Yoruba sauces. They dressed in the same large flowing cloak, called Agbada, and baggy trousers. The Saro educated elite wore the lates London fashions – stiff collars and heavy woolen suits. The traditional elite continued to dress as they had always done but had developed new drinking habits. An observer described Dosunmu as “a good tempered, easy going man, much given to pomp …(he) possessed a hundred wives and innumerable suits of apparel. Visitors are always regaled with Champagne whenever they go to see him and I have heard he kept a most luxurious table.” Whitford wrote that when he met Dosunmu, the Oba was “attired in a clean loose white rob; red silk velvet slippers encase his large feet and gold, silver and brass rings profusely adorn his thumbs, fingers and wrists.”

The press exhibited a deep preoccupation with what it regarded as the essentials of society. The editor of the Eagle and Lagos Critic, Mr E.O Macaulay, writing in 1883, described the society of a place as that class of its community which comprised its ruling body, which absorbed by its influence all other ‘societies’ (he found four in Lagos – the Muslims, the Brazilians, the indigenous and the English, which of course, included the Saros) into its unit and imposed its rules of conduct on the other ‘societies’. To despise the society of the ruling class, Macaulay said, was to commit social suicide. He held that Sir John Glover, governor of the colony, 1866 – 72, understood this and therefore had given Lagos ‘society’ some directions. Glover collected at Government House the most prominent, intelligent and promising of the inhabitants of Lagos whom he created into a society, i.e. “a union in one general interest, social sympathy, companionship”. This society had “name and influence above any other, men and women aspired to become members of it and its doors were open to all who proved themselves (worthy)”. After Glover’s departure, this society was left by successive governors to go ‘moribund’. In 1883, Macaulay continued, it “was almost at death’s doors. With the cord of society thus broken, the various groups considered themselves to be of common social level; a new social egalitarianism developed, each group evolving its own code of rules. The divisions increased fear and suspicion and forced each group to seek strength in unity: it was this that brought tribal sentiments and the formation of tribal associations. Suspicions increased; jealousy, ill-will and rancour followed, judgment perverted and man ceased to be estimated by his intrinsic worth”. Every entertainment that was directed from Government House was seen as “an amelioration of the sad condition of society” in the 1880s. in 1884 the press called for the governor to resume his position as “Social Head” of Lagos.

The governors themselves testified to the high level of civilised society in Lagos. Governor Young in 1885 said Lagos was his first contact with civilisation since he left England. The administrators of Lagos found it impossible to keep up the high level of social entertainment Lagos demanded. And requests for increase in table allowances and salaries were frequent. Griffith described Lagos as “the Queen of West African settlements”. He went on: “ no single settlement on the West coast can compare with Lagos in public expenditure, in imports, and exports, in population or in activity, enterprise, and wealth of her mercantile community…Her merchants are unbounded in their hospitality. They entertain liberally and place the choicest and most expensive services on their tables. Even the natives will offer champagne to visitors…they keep open house and everywhere a cordial welcome awaits a stranger.” Griffith asked for horses and a carriage because both the white and black merchants had them. The Colonial Office, in one of those priceless minutes, thought mules and a carriage would suit the deputy governor best.


"Modern and Traditional Elites in the Politics of Lagos" by Patrick Dele Cole, King's College Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975 at p 45 - 47.

manny4life: Before you start throwing your hands up

Prof Corruption:

Who's to blame for this?

naptu2: Shitta Bey mosque
www.nairaland.com/attachments/696106_shitta20bey20mosque_jpg0d96635b07576632fcfa3e6f7b9b1522

naptu2: Holy Cross Cathedral
www.nairaland.com/attachments/695596_Holy_Cross_Cathedral_Church_jpga25ebad09f08b51f26b2b877297c0266

Prof Corruption:

The law in New York can not exactly be the same with that of Lagos. The culture, environment and perception are quite different.

It does not matter whether you're forced or persuaded to leave. Once you run foul of environmental laws, you have options to choose from. If you don't, LASG ll make decision in her best interest.

naptu2:

naptu2: [img]http://img1.nairaland.com/attachments/695813_Lagos_1930_jpga0ecb089b665ac695aa2daf30ba495a0[/img]

naptu2: I also need to correct a very common mistake, Lagos State was never the capital of Nigeria.

Prof Corruption:

We don't have such money to waste in Lagos. There are several things begging for attention than monitoring if someone arrives safely or not. Who dash monkey banana?

manny4life:

I just helped support your line of argument since your Fashola is looking to "INTERNATIONAL STANDARD", so what is the law here? A crime to be homeless? A crime to be misfortune? Yet, is it a crime to be lazy if you choose to?

manny4life:

No one is asking, after all it was your bruh who brought it up. Given the circumstance

A. Dropping them off in Onitsha bridge

B. At 3am in the morning

C. Unfortunate destitute,

It's only common sense that shows that Lagos program was not in any way designed like NY program.

Prof Corruption:

But part of present day Lagos State was the seat of Federal Government. Of course Jakande was Lagos Governor when Shagari was ruling Nigeria from 1979-83.

manny4life:

No one is asking, after all it was your bruh who brought it up. Given the circumstance

A. Dropping them off in Onitsha bridge

B. At 3am in the morning

C. Unfortunate destitute,

It's only common sense that shows that Lagos program was not in any way designed like NY program.