Lagos KAI and the cost of urbanisation

Ayodele Okunfolami urges KAI and other law enforcement agents to do their job with a human face

Days after videos showing uniformed Lagos State Kick Against Indiscipline officers seizing goods of street traders selling on the walkway went viral, was that of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu warning street traders along the proposed train line to pack their wares off the road. The KAI men were seen putting tubers of yam, buckets of tomatoes and other perishables into their truck. Those that owned the wares were not seen trying to beg the officers to save their goods as typical of Nigerians that sometimes strip themselves naked to prevent an arrest for traffic violation. One can only guess what might have transpired before the KAI officers were seen seizing the goods for the sellers themselves to be absent even if it was to trail where their seized items would end.

No one is defending the street trading; however, one should not blame them. KAI and Lagos State government should be ready for another raid. The actions of KAI officers are no different from Governor Sanwo-Olu’s threat to the street traders along the proposed rail track.

What Lagos State and government at all levels in Nigeria should ask themselves is why enacted laws are repeatedly violated. Making laws more draconian or having different task forces with diverse appellations and colours everywhere changes nothing in a society that has been pushed to the wall of suicides.

The first question our leaders should ask themselves is why everybody seems to be trading one thing or the other. The naira continues to lose ground uncontrollably that exchanging it for goods that can be sold in future for a profit seems to be the easiest way to save. So instead of banking it where inflation will overtake any form of interest, the teacher trades in chin chin and other snacks that she can easily carry to school and sell to her students. The banker trades in shirts, ties, and other office clothing that he can easily put in his car boot to sell to his colleagues to make more gain than the investment packages the bank he works for advertises. While citizens of other parts of the world are making money from their intellectual property, Nigerians are selling property, land and used cars. Our leaders need to wear their thinking caps, if they have heads, to save the economy.

It is amid these austere times that there is competition for market spaces even if it is standing one’s umbrella or cart somewhere. Ironically, it is this same period that Lagos State government is shutting down markets for “environmental” reasons. Bombata and Jankara are the next to be hammered. The environment needs to be taken care of especially for food markets neither are we saying the trains shouldn’t be functional but must it be at the cost of pushing subsistent traders more into economic agony? The reason they are petty traders is because they survive day to day on the little margins they make. Has government linked all these actions to the increasing crime rates?

One is even suspicious of the environmental abuse excuse given for demolishing these markets when one remembers the December 2020 flattening of Festac Market. Whether they are markets or shanties, it is a repeated script of erecting new structures in their stead beyond the purses of the poor that were expelled. What happened to building low-cost markets? All traders need is simple and decent wooden constructions with basic infrastructure where the security of their wares can be guaranteed. Everything must not become “ultra-modern”. If anything, it is our schools and hospitals that should be ultra-modern.

By the way, do the traders not pay taxes and levies for using those shops? Is it by destroying their shops that you prove their taxes are working? Why not rejig the Thursday-Thursday market sanitation exercises if market environment means so much to you? More iniquitous is that hawkers pay dubious levies to the different local councils just to stand on the road. Lagos continues to pretend as if all these touts, agberoes and omoniles that issue “receipts” in the name of the government don’t exist only for them to now use KAI, another Lagos agency, to chase them away.

Has the government considered about how these actions would lead to increase in the prices of staple commodities because for anybody to remain in business, you will have to sell at replacement cost. So that man whose yam was seized on the pavement of Magodo or the vegetable seller whose market was brought down for renovation, will have to sell at the cost of the days he stayed without selling plus the cost of getting another item with one of the same or higher value. At the end, everybody is punished. Inflation is not only dollar nor food insecurity about Boko Haram. Nigeria’s economic woes are more fiscal than monetary.

Lagos and other governments in Nigeria will continue to battle all these resistance from the people to their intentions because the people can’t connect with all these so-called projects. Didn’t they tell us that we would be electrocuted if we cross the rail tracks? Why then is Sanwo-Olu shouting at illiterate street traders? He should just let technology do the job for him when the project is done. They told us Lagos is full of CCTV cameras to catch traffic offenders, yet LASTMA is still struggling steering with drivers killing people on Ago Palace way and going about spiked metals in 2023.

Road constructions take ages disrupting business and causing other noneconomic and unquantifiable losses. At the end of the day, all we hear are superlatives of superhighway, red rail, blue rail, grammar upon grammar, yet commuting time keeps doubling. The roads were built without traffic lights, pelican crossings nor signed adequately. So, pedestrians, drivers and passengers never see themselves in the project. We still encounter the same traffic jams. Environmental concerns upon environmental concerns, yet let rain fall small, flood. Taxes are not the only way to generate income neither is borrowing. Being a smart city is not only by reclaiming the ocean, but also by giving specifics of how each and every of these projects have improved the liveability of citizens and the overall economy of the state.

Sanwo-Olu has got good intentions, but he should be more wholistic. That people keep selling at unauthorised places only suggests the authorised markets are not well located. The sellers have found a way to connect with their buyers at the cheapest cost for both parties. What Sanwo-Olu should do alongside wearing boots in water is to take town planning more seriously. And urban planning is not static forcing the state to look like 1983. Town planning as the tense implies, is continuous. Some markets don’t only need to be brought down; they should be relocated to suit the changing demographics of the state. Ditto other infrastructure.

The people should be carried along. What happened that markets got so deplorable that demolition became the only way out. That’s like watching a cancer. There should have been regular interactions between government and the people that even if demolition would have been the final straw, traders would have bought into the idea.

Finally, to KAI and other law enforcement agents, do your job but be human. You too are victims of the system. You seize okadas only to need one to take you home. You seize roadside tomatoes forgetting that your wives too are selling provisions in one “wrong” corner in the neighbourhood.

 Okunfolami writes from

Festac, Lagos. @ayookunfolami