Waging wrong war against slums

Slums have become the poster face of urban poverty – the poverty that has followed man from the village into the city. Fighting or trying to eliminate them should be the top priority of any government today across the globe, especially in a developing country such as Nigeria. But the best war to dislodge slums should be fought through policies; not with bulldozers escorted by gun-wielding soldiers or policemen. 

The new Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, has declared war on Abuja slums.  

Slums dot the Nigeria’s urban landscape. We have them in Lagos (such as Ajegunle, Makoko, Ijora Badia, Ilaje Bariga, etc.), Port Harcourt, Kano, Aba, and any other town in Nigeria.   

Slums are the reality of the urbanisation of poverty. In the past, poverty was assumed to be a village or rural area phenomenon. Those who were lucky to find themselves in the cities automatically became big men. That is a thing of the past now. Poverty has followed many people right into the city. Its rate of increase is aided by the government’s failure to take everyone along on the journey of development. So, poverty in the city or urban areas today is one of the inescapable realities of our dysfunctional development processes that consign millions of people into perpetual poverty while a few glow in abundance and opulence. 

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A slum is part of an urban centre but in reality, it is not part of that town because it lacks everything that makes for city life. It is characterised by a lack of access to improved water sources, improved sanitation facilities, sufficient living areas, housing durability, and a lack of security of tenure. 

Nobody likes slums, not even those who live in them. Slums are by definition the habitations of the urban poor. They are overcrowded and poorly serviced substandard housing that is unhealthy and socially undesirable, according to Yuval Noah Harari, author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”.  

Slum dwellers are citizens who have been excluded from the mainstream economy. They do not settle in those slums by choice but because they are trapped in their conditions. Many economists, including Professors Paul Collier and Jeffrey Sachs, see poverty as a trap that holds the victims. The trap holds the victims until help comes their way. In some cases that help never comes. 

While they will be dismantling the shanties that mark the slums, or perhaps before doing so, the government and its agencies must take their time to understand the dynamics of urban poverty or its physical manifestation in the form of slums. Why is it that what usually starts as a little appendage on the outskirts of a city soon balloons into a behemoth of dirt, dregs of society, only good to be poured away and put out of the sight of those who matter? 

They should try to understand why the population of slums grows so quickly over time. An understanding of these factors can help a government that is sincere about fighting poverty, both in the rural and urban areas. Both are now organically related.  Is it not a human tragedy that what a man is running away from in the village follows him and creates even bigger problems for him in the place where he has gone to seek shelter? Urban poverty is proving to be a bigger challenge than rural poverty, according to recent research reports. 

Let the government agencies take random samples of the slum dwellers to find out if any of them, or better, what proportion of them, would want to remain there if given access to such places as Asokoro in Abuja, Lekki in Lagos, etc. They may be poor but they are rational beings. Rationality is key to an understanding of choice by economic agents. The average human being is assumed to be rational, which means that he or she would prefer the better of two alternatives, and in the same way, would prefer more to less of a good thing. 

Destroying the slums will not amount to the elimination or eradication of poverty. It is certainly not a solution to poverty. Assuming that would amount to believing that a certain sickness has gone just because the symptoms have disappeared. 

Palliatives and similar emergency measures cannot address the problem of poverty, including the version in the city. Destroying shanties housing the urban poor without well-thought programmes for poverty eradication might just end up as a wild goose chase. It could be similar to some of the issues raised by Taibat Olaitan Lawanson, a Professor of Urban Management and Governance, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Lagos, in her Inaugural lecture in June this year. 

In the lecture titled “Alternative Urbanisms: Beyond Utopian Visions of the ‘Emerging’ African City,” Lawanson pointed out what she described as the “urban paradox in Africa”, which refers to the unfortunate situation of the continuation of urban poverty despite megaprojects that have been executed in the cities by managers in a bid to promote the global image of their cities. 

In many of the cities where such projects have been implemented, “the prosperity and well-being of urban residents (especially the poor) hardly correlates, hence the urban paradox,” the professor noted. 

Lawanson blamed the growing incidence of urban poverty on the rising rural-urban migration, the dearth of job openings in the cities and the lack of skills and/or education by the migrants for the available jobs. According to her: “Without requisite skills, economic opportunities are limited to the margins of urban life where they can only access precarious informal employment.”

Urbanisation will continue to rise, and with it the number of urban poor, until the fundamental issues are addressed. The urban population is expected to rise to five billion by 2030, while the number of urban poor could rise to as many as two billion. 

Nigeria has not built any new city recently, not any that I know of since the development of Abuja as the Federal Capital Territory. But let one new town be developed in this country today. With the current configuration of the population sharply divided between the extremely rich and extremely poor, it will be a matter of years before slums develop around such a brand-new city.