The wooden canoe gently cuts through the black water and splits in two an island of garbage floating in the middle of the channel. At the bow of the boat, Taiwo Shemede, 35, grits his teeth and cannot hide the worried look on his face.
At the stern of the canoe, about seven meters long, his friend Farook leans on a pole that is twice his height and uses its weight to propel the canoe forward.
Taiwo looks towards a fixed point on the horizon, just below the Third Mainland Bridge, the bridge that connects the city with the largest business center of Lagos, where the most exclusive neighborhoods of the megacity of 24 million inhabitants are built.
In addition to dismay, Taiwo’s grimace is also one of anger and impatience. He wants to show us something and it’s urgent.
Around us, Makoko, the Venice of Nigeria, emerges in all its splendor: a humble fishing neighborhood where more than 200,000 people live and is already the largest flooded informal settlement in Africa.
Built on a shallow lagoon in 1860 by Egun fishermen, its inhabitants travel in canoes through a labyrinth of flooded alleys between houses with irregular planks and corrugated board roofs, built on wooden pillars. It smells like stagnant water and diesel and there is life everywhere.
Three children play bomb throws from one of the terraces and two boys in their twenties, who are mending a white net hanging from a stick, nod when they see us passing by.
When the canoe leaves the last house behind and opens onto the lagoon, Taiwo, an activist and graduate in Administration and Business, as well as a neighbor of Makoko and son of the Balee, leader of the community, clicks his tongue and tells us that we are leaving. to find: David’s last fight against the giant Goliath. The definitive battle.
“Makoko is very close to the business center of Lagos, that is why the government wants to give these lands to the rich. They know that these lands are worth a fortune and are a business opportunity, which is why they are filling the lagoon with sand so they can build luxury houses. We bother them because we are poor, that’s why they want to expel us from the neighborhood where we have lived for generations.”
Taiwo’s lament draws on experience. The Nigerian government has in the past issued several eviction orders to the residents of Makoko with the justification that it is an illegal and unhealthy settlement and in 2012 sent several officials with excavators to demolish dozens of houses.
A man died in clashes with the police and the justice system then stopped the expulsions.
Since a court declared Makoko’s eviction unconstitutional in 2017 and stated that the government should compensate and provide alternative housing to the expelled residents, the authorities have changed tactics.
From the tip of the canoe, Taiwo points toward that tactical turn with his chin. “See that island? We can’t get any closer, there are police and security agents who could shoot us,” he says.
In a corner next to the bridge, evidence of the beginning of the end of Makoko appears: an artificial island of white sand, with two metal constructions in the center, and crossed by a pipe. It is land reclaimed from the sea.
On May 9 last year, the Nigerian real estate company FBT Coral Estate Ltd, specialized in “creating avenues to reduce the housing deficit in Lagos”, began drainage and sand filling works in front of the Makoko neighborhood.
There he plans to build a luxury complex for 400,000 residents with five-star hotels, designer apartments, gardens, shopping centers, a promenade and three marinas for yachts.
The real estate company’s plan pulls no punches: “This project will transform the marginal Makoko shanty town area into a thriving 21st century Lagos smart city.” They have already started selling off-plan houses.
From one of the last wooden shacks, fisherman Tohulotin Eli, 53, carries too much life on his shoulders not to know what this new island means.
“They will throw us all out, but since they couldn’t by force, now they have decided that they will make our lives miserable. That island of sand will grow larger and larger and form a wall so that we cannot go out fishing; and without fish this entire community will suffer. Fishing is our life and the way we feed our families. If they take it away from us, we will have to leave or die of hunger.”
The FBT Coral Estate project plans an almost literal wall: the filling of sand will not stop until creating a 7-kilometer-long, 58-hectare boardwalk, the equivalent of 35 blocks of Barcelona’s Eixample, on which the Nigerian Manhattan will be built. .
It is a future plan aimed at the elite – in Lagos there are 6,300 Nigerians with more than a million dollars – where there is no room for the disinherited from Makoko. Because the worst omens have already begun to come true.
Nicholas Adikpo, who has been out fishing early every morning since he could remember, is tired of retrieving his empty nets.
“The noise and sand removed from the construction company’s work have scared away the fish; and there were fewer than before because of climate change, because there are more and more strong storms, fresh water mixes with salt water and the fish leave because they can no longer breed here.”
If the attempt to reclaim land from the sea, with mammoth machines throwing sand onto the coast without stopping, does not seem like the best antidote to the climate crisis, Rebecca Oke’s lament draws a grotesque corkscrew in the same direction.
Oke, a mother of three children, welcomes us sitting in her house in Makoko in front of a basin full of fish and next to two giant coals, where she smokes the fish that she then sells in markets in Lagos. But they are not Nigerian fish.
“For seven or eight years there hasn’t been enough fish and what there is is smaller, so we have to buy it outside, smoke it and sell it to earn some money.” Every day, the fishing neighborhood of Makoko is visited by refrigerated trucks selling 20 kilo packages of frozen fish of the worst quality and with an unsustainable origin for the planet: the fish comes from Holland, Chile or Hong Kong.
Eko, who like his children has never gone to school, revels in the nonsense. “We are a fishing neighborhood, how is it possible that we have to buy fish from so far away?” he laments.
Given the resistance of the residents of Makoko to leave, the government has promised to rehouse them in houses if they opt for a safe exit.
Twenty minutes away, on the exclusive Lekki peninsula, is the answer to the government’s kind offer.
At the end of a wide avenue, behind bars guarded by police and military, tall buildings with large windows rise, half built.
Aremu Sunday breaks out in hives when she sees them. He was a resident of the Gbameh fishing neighborhood until, in 2016, they were expelled.
“We lived right here! The military came without warning, with machines and excavators and destroyed everything. There were more than 2,000 inhabitants here, hundreds of houses! They destroyed our lives. They promised us houses, everything, and then they gave us nothing. This was like a little Makoko, with flooded canals, and they erased it. This is what will happen to Makoko. They will fill it with sand, build luxury houses and use violence because we are poor and have no strength. “I only feel anger and pain.”
