The villages along Abuja’s airport road prepared for the arrival of bulldozers this week, and most residents were busy removing all the valuable fittings from their houses. But one group of men in Aleita decided their imminent eviction was too much to worry about, and sat down to play draughts instead.
We found the group of men playing under the shade of some trees, sitting with two boards on their knees, playing game after game. In the background people hammering their security doors out of plaster walls and the revving of overloaded cars could be heard.
“What is the point? Some of us have had our houses demolished four or five times. We have nothing left,” said Timothy Oje, a 52 year old family man, “Why should we stir ourselves?”
His feeling about the way Abuja is run is unambiguous: “They are demons, they are wolves” he says.
He came to Abuja in the 1990s when it was beginning. Eventually settling in Chika along the airport road. He said: “Abuja was a desert. The government was saying come and develop Abuja, come, come! People came in their masses to develop the city. Now Abuja is developed, they are saying go away. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He ran a shop in the suburb that was demolished last year. As yet nothing has been developed on the site of his old home.
Anger beginning to show in his voice Timothy says: “They could have made a development to show us that they were serious. This is the reasons. Right now we know this area is for them.
“My business is paralysed, my house is gone, and all the money I saved up for my business is exhausted. I am now going home penniless. What kind of government do we have?”
Timothy, an indigene of Otuku, Benue state, is contemplating giving in and returning. His wife has already gone back. “My wife is making arrangements there for my children. Why not just go back? But I feel that I have wasted everything I had.”
Nasir El Rufa’i is on record as saying “Abuja is not for everyone”. Last week at an event in Kuje for International Literacy Day, he and other FCT ministers said illiterate migrants to the city were “distorting the master plan for the capital”.
Timothy says: “We know that we are their servants, we drive their cars, we dry clean their clothes, where do we stay?”
The FCT has said it has a duty to clear slums like Aleita. They are unhygienic and disease ridden.
But that doesn’t impress Jerry Abba, a 35 year old engineer, he said: “They planned Asokoro, Maitama, the Federal government made the plans for themselves. You’re supposed to carry the poor along, provide low cost housing that people can afford. We have been waiting for 25 years for them to help us with sanitation and such things. I am so bitter because even under the military government we had it better than this. Where is the dividend of democracy?”
Noone is in any doubt what will happen to the land. “They will give it to themselves for sure,” said Mike Okey, a 46-year-old businessman. “And before that it will not be to their advantage, all this are will be bush. Robberies are already bad on the airport road, with no one living here, they are bound to be worse.”