March 9, 2011 02:29AM |  print  email   |
Nine-year-old Chichi Njoku wants to go to school, but cannot afford to. The pale looking girl, armed with a dirty exercise book, a pencil and a tattered Macmillan textbook, is determined to keep abreast with her studies. Her classroom is a corner of her family’s tiny rusted zinc shanty house. The tattered and rusted zinc roofs of the shanty protects the family of ten from the scotching sun and the intermittent rains.
All due to the great fire
The girl is not in school like other children of her age as a result of the fire that levelled the Otto-Illogbo Slum last year. Chichi’s family lost everything to the mysterious fire. Her case typifies that of over 300 children living in the community. Life has been unbearable for the families living in the slum since the fire. Over two hundred houses were destroyed and more than 1500 residents rendered homeless. Businesses and property, valued at millions of naira, were also destroyed.
One year after the fire, the residents’ hope of starting afresh has been dashed as no assistance has come from the state government or any other organization to help them rebuild their lives and pick up the pieces of their past. Agbodimu Musbau, the Chairman of the community, said the residents are disheartened by the failure of the government to resettle them and provide relief materials. “After the fire, the next day we wrote an appeal letter to the governor calling for assistance,” he said. “Officials from LASEMA, Special Duties, and the Rural Development came to visit us, and delivered the government’s condolence. They said very soon the government will resettle us and provide relief materials. The officers visited us on two other occasions but up till now nothing has been provided as relief materials or aid to help us rebuild our lives.”
Mr. Musbau added that several visits by the executives of the slum to get the government to assist them have not yielded any result. “It is just the Star Clinic at Ebute-Metta that came to our aid,” he said. “We are citizens of Lagos and according to one of the MDGs, housing is one of the amenities that must be provided for the people before 2015. How can the government achieve that, when they are neglecting people living in the slum?”
Not voting
As a result of the development, most of the residents said they may not vote for any of the candidates in the forth-coming election. Paul Njoku, who lost his business to the fire, said residents have been living like animals and would not vote during the April polls. “My family lost more than N500, 000; money my wife was using for business,” he said. “I was a cloth merchant but I lost all my goods. One of my children got burnt in the fire and our house was completely razed. We have been living like animals since then ... we are suffering bitterly and it is sad that during the governorship debate our hope was further dashed when none of the governorship aspirants in the state even mentioned us. To them we do not exist, so why should we vote for them, when they do not know that we are existing.”
Another resident, who gave her name as Mama Bola said: “I was selling drinks and my business was booming, sometimes I used to make profit of more than N50, 000 per day but since the fire I have lost everything. There was time that I fell ill because of the troubles the fire caused. I was hospitalised and my children have not been going to school. So I am going to stay indoors that voting day because the government is not helping us.”
Effort to contact the state’s Commissioner for Rural Development, Lanre Balogun, were unsuccessful as calls made to his mobile phone went unanswered.
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