‘My house is a house of rats’: Why 150 women marched carrying lanterns & a petition

She lives by a huge rubbish dump in Kuchigoro. The dump grows taller every day and it is right to say that she lives within it. Liquids flow from the site and make their way into her house and other nearby houses which sit in a valley. The rain washes all the filth into the […]

She lives by a huge rubbish dump in Kuchigoro. The dump grows taller every day and it is right to say that she lives within it. Liquids flow from the site and make their way into her house and other nearby houses which sit in a valley.

The rain washes all the filth into the houses beneath when the season comes, and so in this place nobody looks forward to the rainy season. Hers is a world populated by rats and she exclaims to some visitors ‘My house is a house of rats,’ openly conceding ownership to the rodents.

Helen Emmanuel is one of the many residents of Kuchigoro, a settlement of the urban poor, located just 15 minutes drive from the Abuja city centre. The people live in a community which lacks basic infrastructure. Ibrahim Iliyasu comments on life in another similar location ‘There is one woman in Kayache who gets water for her household from unused soak away pits. The soak away has been dug but it’s not yet connected to the toilet yet. When it rains water gathers in there, and this is one source of water for her. It seems that the people in the area are also competing with the cows in terms of access to water sources. ‘In another settlement some of the   houses are built without toilets.

One landlord waives rent for a month so that the tenants would be able to construct a toilet for themselves. It’s hard to control or reduce the habit of open defecation in such places. The women speak about going to the health centre when the labour pains begin, or they may go for the ante natal check, but in either case nobody is available to attend to them, and in a few instances   volunteers run some of the clinics.

The total effect of these conditions slows down and lowers the quality of life. The FCT receives 5000 newcomers every day, Daily Trust finds out, and there are few or no facilities at all to support the increasing numbers, and the facilities that exist are either overstretched or crippled.

The population of those who live in shacks and slums will rise, in a city which seems to have been built to serve the rich and the privileged. No wonder there are no proper access roads to some of these communities, which makes waste evacuation by trucks difficult, if not impossible. From  other  urban poor communities in the FCT more  disturbing images of the human condition  present themselves, and this is what inspired MIND Nigeria to begin a  project  known as the WATCH  project  two years ago in Kayache, Kuchigoro, Karmo  and Bassan Jiwa, four  communities within  the FCT with a total population of some  2 million  persons. MIND is an NGO which employs participatory media techniques to give a voice to groups which are usually not visible in the media.

 

 

Marching with lanterns

Iliyasu, Media consultant to the project says ‘The WATCH project ran for two years, and the focus of it had been the lack of basic amenities, water, education, livelihood and health in the communities’.

He explains the form in which the project developed ‘We have been working with these women to build up their advocacy. We go to their communities, and we prioritise their problems, and we try to train them in advocacy, in other words we guide them on how they can take steps to correct these problems we are prioritising.

Thus, advocacy is a very strong aspect of this project.’ On December 15 last year,  a group  of 150 persons from the above mentioned communities who had been part of the WATCH  project , marched from the millennium park Abuja to the National Assembly to present a petition with well over 17,000 signatories, to their elected representatives.

The petition was themed ‘Step down poverty-Step up human rights’ and the women of urban poor communities took the lead in the effort which involved setting priorities to collecting signatures. Iliyasu adds ‘The march to the national assembly signifies that the people are trying to advocate for their rights. For them, they have collected all these issues from their communities, and they are marching to their elected officials to come and work with them as joint problem solvers, to make sure that these things are met in the communities.

The elected officials do not live in the communities with them, but those who marched live in the communities and so they have a lot to say about life there.’ He points out ‘By the time they arrived the national assembly bearing lanterns, they were not a rented crowd. They were people who had lived a project, and they were people who now had something to say. They had also found people to talk to, and so it was a very important moment.’ He comments on the significance of the lanterns ‘We looked at what statement we wish to make with the march.

All of a sudden it struck us that all these people live in communities which are barely 15 minutes drive from the centre of the FCT. So there is a lot of civilisation or light around them, yet they are in darkness. The significance of the lantern was about lighting up their lives. All around them is civilisation, and yet they are in darkness and they should be freed from it .Development should be extended to them. ’

 

 

Plight of urban poor

Ummi Bukar, Project Officer, WATCH says of the effort ‘It’s a gender advocacy project, working in urban poor communities. All along while working with the women, we have been building up their advocacy. We go to their communities and we prioritise their problems, and we don’t leave it at that. We try and train them in advocacy, how they can take steps to correct the problems they are prioritising. The march to the national assembly is part of them trying to advocate for their rights. For them they have collected all these issues from their communities, and they are marching to their elected representatives to encourage them to come and work with them as joint problem solvers.’

Bukar opens up on some of the issues suffered by the inhabitants of these communities ‘You are living in Karmo, and you can’t afford stalls in Karmo market. In Kuchingoro, you don’t even have a market, and you cannot sell anything. In Bassan Jiwa again, you can farm but your farmland is constantly being collected from you and you have to sell by the roadside, and the task force attacks you from time to time.’ While at the national assembly the people presented a petition which called for improved public service delivery to residents in urban poor communities in the FCT in 5 key areas, namely water, waste management, healthcare, livelihoods and education. They were received by the Chairman, Senate Committee on the FCT, Senator Dino Melaye, as well as two other members of the committee, Senators Danjuma Laah and Bayero Nafada.

 

 

Poison leaks into the ground

Ilse Van Lamoen-Isoun, Director MIND speaks about the work of the NGO in the context of social conditions in the FCT ‘People might not directly associate Abuja with poverty, but we did want to set Abuja on the agenda. This is a vast growing city, and every day there are statistics which can be contested. The FCT Minister presented the statistic that every day about 5000 people come into Abuja, and this puts immense pressure on public infrastructure in the city and this is a problem that’s not really acknowledged.

Somehow, government seems to be going on redesigning the city for the rich and the wealthy, without really resolving the fact that every city has low income residents. You need those jobs as much as you need your high profile jobs. If you need people to contribute to the economy at all levels, you have to make sure that the people at all levels live a human life in the city, and right now that definitely is not the case.’

 

 

Only 10% have water

She explains ‘In Abuja only 10% of households have access  to tap water, all others don’t  and need to buy water which means they are spending much more money than those rich and wealthy that have access to the main grid. We thought that if we  show how much misery this one issue is causing in the individual lives of women, maybe that is one way of setting the agenda, and so we started to capture the stories of those women.’

One  of the stories is that of ‘a girl in Kayache who has to fetch water every day in the morning, and because of this she goes late to school and the teacher gets her to do the frog jump as a punishment’. Isoun explains ‘Here you see the cyclical nature of poverty. She does not have access to water, and this affects her educational opportunities.

We also spoke with women who spend many hours a day fetching water .Now, if you add that time over the course of a year, you get 8 hour work days. This amounts to 2-4 months fetching water. Think about all the women in these communities who have to go through this, and think again of how much economic potential we are missing simply because government cannot provide decent access to water .These were some of the issues we wanted people to talk about through the project .’

 

 

Future

As a fallout of the march, government has started to provide waste containers in some of the communities, and the committee members are now more keen than ever on having better sanitation in their settlements.

The health facility at Kuchigoro also recently received two ambulances and efforts are on by MIND to see that the project does not go to sleep with the march which, as stated earlier, was the climax of the 2 year long WATCH project. After the march Umar Madaki, Hakimi of Kuchigoro said ‘I didn’t know that our women were capable of going to the national assembly and making senators to come out and make promises’.

The Chief Imam of Kuchigoro thinks something new is in the air. According to him ‘the women have done things which the men have not been able to do’. On her part Isoun   says ‘We want to go back to the communities and start with the Hakimi to see how some of these influential people can also help to keep up the pressure. They are very interested and would love to continue this type of work in their communities as well as in others.’

The women have been given some level of independence as a ripple effect of the project in the form of livelihoods training: Now they can make mosquito repellent candles, shea butter soap, pomade and hair cream, and they now have skills in bead making.

They are more outspoken whereas in the past they were rather shy. Even the husbands are impressed with the great new change that has come upon their wives, who have now shunned ethnic and religious barriers to embrace a brand new way of thinking, living and doing things. Finally, Isoun adds ‘We hope government will respond to the project positively, instead of seeing it as an accusation,or as criticism.

They should see it as a means of getting input from our people, in terms of what they want the government to do in their communities.’