In Lagos, cruising with lagoon’s canoe traders
Makoko, Ilaje and Okobaba area of Lagos, adjacent to the Third Mainland Bridge, are home to various groups of ‘better-life-seekers’. Some of them have even brought their families along the low-brow area, while others are starting families because they can’t cope with the cost of living in the city. Residents here mostly build huts of […]
Makoko, Ilaje and Okobaba area of Lagos, adjacent to the Third Mainland Bridge, are home to various groups of ‘better-life-seekers’. Some of them have even brought their families along the low-brow area, while others are starting families because they can’t cope with the cost of living in the city. Residents here mostly build huts of plank and bamboo, covering them with metal sheets, cardboard and even palm fronds. In a quaint way, their surroundings mimic an actual city, except for the fact that their ‘neighbourhoods’ do not have streets and buildings cannot be identified easily because they have no numbers. And there’s the toilet issue: They have none, so they defecate directly into the lagoon.
Weekly Trust observed that there is no access into the community except with a canoe, paddled by men, and in some cases, women too. There is also no government presence in the area. A majority of residents are from Ilaje-Ese-Odo area of Ondo State and they are predominantly fishermen – and women. Within their makeshift, ‘floating’ huts on the lagoon, majority measuring 10 to 12 feet or a little more in some cases, there is an army of full-time housewives, including kids, who hawk food, water, Kerosene, fairly-used clothes and various other domestic wares brought from Mainland Lagos.
Dozens of such traders carry out their business by moving from one part of the community to another on a canoe. One of them, Mrs. Awanat Aduke, brings local gin in a canoe for labourers at Okobaba Sawmill. The sawmill workers ply their trade on the lagoon for a greater part of the day sorting out logs of wood brought from Ondo State. “Some other sellers bring food for them, seven days a week, on canoes,” Aduke says. She’s been doing this for five years now, she tells Weekly Trust. Asked about the risk of paddling for about 30 minutes to get to customer s on the lagoon, she replied in Pidgin: “My brother, I no fit stop.” She added that it would amount to injustice to ask her to abandon her only means of livelihood when government had not provided an alternative.
Mercy Akhiode, 22, and a mother of two, hawks bananas and groundnuts across the community on the lagoon on a canoe. She decried the demolition of some of the huts that serve as home to her customers by the state government. “There are no jobs for someone like me. I want to work even if it is as a cleaner in a government office,” she says, adding that she takes care of her two boys as her husband is jobless. “We must pay rent and take care of other responsibilities. Both of us cannot remain idle and depend on what we could get from neighbours. I started trading on a canoe last year, after I learned how to paddle and a little about swimming.”
Some of the canoe-paddling traders told Weekly Trust that the government frequenytly makes life miserable for them. Akhiode said: “Government cannot succeed with its plan to chase the Ilaje people away from Lagos Lagoon. We are Nigerians and we are free to live and work anywhere we choose. If there is a market place and the cost of the store is affordable, I will not be a canoe paddler, not to talk of hawking groundnuts and bananas on the lagoon.”
Akhiode also said if one goes to Tejuosho Market in Yaba or the Oyigbo Market that is still under construction, “Or wherever you see market re-constructed by the government, ask for the cost of a shop: Then, you will understand why I’m into this risky trade.”
Obiora Adibe, who, until February 2012, was hawking household utensils on Lagos roads, attributed his change in business and location to the clampdown on hawkers by the Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI) officials. “I don’t belong here but what would one do?” he said. He deals in second-hand clothes and his target customers are the residents of the community on the lagoon. “It’s not easy to do this business because I have phobia for large bodies of water and the sales are not spectacular,” he told Weekly Trust.
At the banks of the lagoon, a large number of women who trade in fish and shrimp brought there by fishermen (and women) are haggling in earnest. The trading takes place at the bank of the lagoon every day. Most of those women, with children strapped to their backs buy in wholesale and retail to their customers across the community, using their canoes to move from one point to another. As they eke out a living across the lagoon despite the inherent danger, their main prayer is that bulldozers would not find their way to Ilaje and thrown them out of business.
As the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria, Lagos has continued to be a major attraction for Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike from far and near. The daily influx of people from neighbouring states: Ogun, Oyo, Edo, Ogun, Ekiti and Ondo states, has in no small measure, contributed to the growing infrastructural and housing challenges facing the mega-city. Its rapid population growth, with its attendant pressure on existing infrastructure, has, without doubt, raised the stakes as more people compete with little resources. The promise of a better life has attracted droves of unemployed bricklayers, labourers, electricians, mechanics, commercial bus drivers, hawkers and the like, to the city.