This is Otodo Gbame, a fishing, waterfront and ancestral community in Lekki area of Lagos, southwest Nigeria.
This community is being illegally (against a Court ruling on January 26) demolished by the heartless and lawless administration of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode.
Lagos State Governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode (2nd left), with Chief Judge of Lagos State, Justice Olufunmilyo Atilade (middle); newly sworn judges – Hon. Justice Elizabeth Idowu Alakija (2nd right); Hon. Justice Emmanuel Olugbemiga Ogundare (right) and Hon. Justice Serifat Oloruntoyin Solebo (left) during the swearing-in ceremony of Three Judges of the Lagos State High Court at the Banquet Hall, Lagos House, Ikeja, on Wednesday, March 8, 2017.
I took the picture of this woman last week shortly after her house was demolished by the Lagos state taskforce on the orders of Mr. Ambode.
Most people read about demolitions in the newspapers or watch it for one minute on TV screens.
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But being there, seeing thousands of people being rendered homeless in a matter of hours as teargas were being fired and excavators were crushing everything in sight was deeply demoralising.
What struck me the most was that people were trying to salvage what mattered most to them, a chair here, a mattress there, a roof here.
As excavators were approaching, after they tried but failed to form a human shield, to protect their homes, it was time to pick up that thing they needed the most.
And what they were picking was heart wrenching. Seeing students who were returning from school only to find out that their houses had been crushed was deeply troubling.
Seeing a woman who had just given birth while the demolition was ongoing and had nowhere to go with her two-day old baby was profoundly painful.
And so I have been reading about informal settlements in Nigeria, not just Lagos, but in other corners of Africa’s most populous nation.
As for governor Ambode, he would go down, not just as someone who built little bus stops, but someone who was hijacked by the rich, and moved callously against the poor, rendering hundreds of thousands of them homeless in the mega city of Lagos.
Akinwunmi Ambode (Middle)
Mr. Ateba is the publisher of simonateba.com