Ridding Nigeria of illegality and giving Jos a facelift

Last week, while in Jos, I saw shops in residential neighborhoods being torn down. The shop-owners paid rent to the owners of the land and had been there for years. One young woman ran a hair salon and sold clothing out of a small wooden shop on the side of the road. Under her verandah […]

Last week, while in Jos, I saw shops in residential neighborhoods being torn down. The shop-owners paid rent to the owners of the land and had been there for years. One young woman ran a hair salon and sold clothing out of a small wooden shop on the side of the road. Under her verandah hung bright silks and cottons that fluttered in the breeze.  When I passed last week, her salon was gone.

One man had been selling provisions out of a couple of containers for seven years.  Not only did he pay rent to the owners of the land, he told me he had a government permit for the containers and that he paid a yearly tax to the JMDB. “If it is illegal, why do I have permission to be here? Why am I paying tax?” Since he had a permit, he said, “they should have given us written notice terminating our contract,” but the Task -force had just come and painted an X on the outside of his container. He said he had appealed to the JMDB with his permit and written documentation from his landlord, but it was to no avail. Eventually, he paid N30,000 to a truck-driver to remove the containers. “It’s injustice,” he said. “We struggle so that our children can go to school, to university, and make a better life. But no matter what they do to us, God will make a way.”

“I lost my husband in 1991,” another woman told me. Since that time, she has been feeding her children and sending them to school by selling food on the side of the road. “Now my children have finished secondary school but they can’t find work,” she said. After twenty years of selling food, she had, last month, gotten the permission of the owners of the land to build a small zinc structure, where customers could sit while they ate. She told me she paid 33,000 naira for three bundles of zinc to build the structure.  It lasted one month before the task force made her tear it down. “Now the rains are coming,” she said, “and we will cook in the rain.”

Another woman had a sturdy shop with a strong cement foundation. She sells books and provisions and had been paying rent to the owner of the land for fifteen years.  Although she paid yearly taxes to the JMDB and had never had a problem with the Task-force before, this time they marked her shop. Now, she sits beside the cement foundation and displays a few books on a wooden shelf, but she said there is no way that she can make the kind of income she made before. “It will be difficult with the rain,” she told me. “If books get wet, no one will buy them.” She can now bring only a few wares at a time to display on her wooden stand.

Another woman’s husband has cancer and her daughters are in university. She has been trying to pay for her husband’s treatment and her daughters’ school fees through working as a house help and maintaining a little zinc shop. When I asked her why she thought she was being ordered to remove her shop, she said the government thought the zinc shacks made the town look “dirty.”

When I spoke to Matthias Nshem Hata, Acting General Manager of the JMDB on 25 April, he told me, “The government intends to give Jos a facelift. […] Most of these structures are erected without permission. They are defacing the city, obstructing free traffic flow, blocking drainage, and making the environment unsightly. There’s also the issue of security.” When I asked him about those who had permits and were paying taxes, he said “a temporary permit is one you can give today and ask you to move tomorrow.” Following the end of the demolishing exercise, he said, the JMDB would come up with a model that would specify the height, construction material to be used, locations, and other requirements and people could reapply for permits. But they would be quite strict this time, he said. “Any structure must be orderly and well-planned. We want the beauty of the town to be restored.” He reminded me that other states were carrying out similar exercises and assured me that those who initially had a permit would be shown priority with reapplication.

While some of the shop-owners I spoke to had permits, others admitted they had shops torn down in previous years and knew the small structures they built to try to feed their families and pay school fees were illegal. Yet the shops I saw demolished were all built against walls. They were not blocking drainage ditches or roads. Neither would they block sidewalks if the JMDB decided to provide such a convenience. They were built close to residential areas where people can send children out to buy provisions. They were beneficial both to those who ran them and those who patronized them, and many of the owners, it seems, were women. If the Task-Force is concerned about security, surely it is much safer to have people who have been there for years and know the neighborhood watching the road all day than long walled corridors of empty streets. But, of course, cosmetic improvements are a priority in bringing peace back to Jos.

So, this is the tale of two kinds of lawbreakers in Nigeria: the first an elite who live on billions siphoned from the Nigerian budget, which could otherwise provide infrastructure like steady light, water, good roads, and security, but who are rarely given any serious penalty for their crimes, the second poor people, who in absence of the economic boost that would be brought by such infrastructure, are trying to scrape by with small businesses housed in structures of ambiguous legality.

A few days after I spoke to those shop-owners whose street had been so prettified that there is now an unobstructed view of the spiked cement block walls, a row of beautiful old mango trees down the street from Central Bank of Nigeria in Jos were chopped down. In Kenya, Wangari Maathai won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in planting 20-30 million trees. In Jos, old trees are cut down as the Sahara Desert moves south. Hata told me that the state government wanted to expand the road, and was building a new building that needed more parking space. They would plant flowering trees to replace the mango trees and beautify the place, he said. In the meantime, fruit sellers, some of whom have been sitting under those trees for thirty-five years, recently had all of their wares destroyed in mob violence after the COCIN Headquarters bomb. They now sit beside the mangled tree branches, their fruit wilting in the sun.