Nigeria, a country that demolishes more than it builds - Abimbola Adelakun

Popular singer Yemi Alade recently drew the ire of some online commentators when she decried the frequency of house demolitions in Lagos. Some of these commenters’ vociferous defence of the government’s decision to demolish houses left me wondering if this is not schadenfreude. Do these people truly believe in the irreproachability of the government, or derive vicarious joy in watching relatively well-off people’s houses being bulldozed? Either way, when it comes to issues of house demolitions, the chatter that attends them is also a problem. We tend to focus on the wrong things. The real trouble with the demolitions is that they are done under the guise of improving the cityscape. Yet, year in and year out our urban spaces remain dysfunctional. What good have the demolitions done?

Last year when the Lagos State government was demolishing houses around Lekki, Ajao Estate, Alaba Market, Abule Egba, and Ladipo, most of the discussion was about the ethnicity of the house owners. Groups alleged that the houses selected for demolition belonged to Igbos, and that the demolition was political vindictiveness. Other groups bounced out with proof that more of those houses belonged to Yorubas, and therefore the allegation of ethnic bias was unfounded.

In all of the bickering and bitter exchange of which tribe the house owners originated from, we forgot to ask what follows. How is the city being rebuilt? Are there options other than demolition that we can explore? Can we imagine a re-organisation of our urban spaces without wasting so much capital that people invested in what is being destroyed? Truth is, too many demolitions do not suggest seriousness about restoring the master plan of an urban landscape. What it signals is a stunted imagination, a chronic inability to think.

Look beyond Lagos State (where another round of demolition is ongoing) and you will find the same attitude elsewhere in the country. Virtually every Nigerian leader has a plan to destroy but no concomitant one to (re-)build. It has become customary to read media reports of this governor planning to demolish 160 houses. Another time you read that that governor too will demolish an entire estate. The one who was just inaugurated yesterday arrived with a plan to level down a street. What you will hardly hear is their plans to at least re-build. Ours is to plunder, never to plough or preserve. For a poor country without a sustained flow of capital, we lack the prudence to manage resources. The little we have, we are rather too quick to bulldoze them. 

Let us take, for instance, ex-Rivers governor Nyesom Wike. When he was first appointed as Minister of Federal Capital Territory, one of his early addresses to the press was his plan to demolish anything that stood in the way of his vacuousness. The sadistic relish with which he talked about bringing down erected structures was quite telling of his barbarism. Like the primitive man who cannot reason beyond what instinct dictates, Wike takes the demolition exercise as the end. Ask him what his vision of the FCT should look like and how all the buildings he is bringing down will help him achieve it, and I can guarantee he will have no clue whatsoever.

He has not quite thought about it, and he is still not going to think about it simply because you asked. Why? Because he is not out to achieve anything in the FCT other than accumulate wealth and power. Wike just wants to destroy, and that is also because he knows nothing else to do. He was not appointed to be a city builder anyway. He is where he is because he helped the All Progressives Congress win the 2023 election and will remain there to help them win again in 2027. He uses his office like a political trophy because that is all it is. Like his fellow demolishers in parts of the country, Wike lacks any sophisticated idea of how our urban spaces ought to be rebuilt and how cities should function. They just want to repossess land and re-award it to their cronies.

Before we fall into the temptation of thinking that Wike’s administrative excesses are unique, consider former Kaduna governor, the one-man evil called Nasir El-Rufai. This was a man who made a career out of house demolitions while he too was the FCT minister. The praises he received for restoring the FCT master plan must have turned his head the other way because, as governor, he demolished houses as if they were built with pebbles. For instance, in 2020, a random poster appeared on social media saying a restaurant and lounge in the state was going to be the venue of a “Kaduna Sex Party.” Without waiting to verify if there was truly going to be a sex party, the state Urban Planning and Development Agency demolished the building on his orders. They were clear on their reasons for bringing down the building until they got some blowback. Then they changed their rationale to alleging the “illegality” of the structure.

El Rufai not only spent a chunk of his tenure demolishing everything from churches to houses, he continued that state-sanctioned malevolence even hours before he handed power to his successor. The Gbagi community where he carried out this final demolition had to be reportedly held down with dozens of security agents who left their trademark sorrow tears and blood in their wake. El Rufai did all of that but (re-)built virtually nothing. Ask him how better Kaduna State functions due to that demolition exercise, and you see a man who was just wicked for nothing.

Then there are categories of beasts who demolish as a sign of conquest, a vanquishing of their political opponent. Successive governors do that for malicious reasons. One of the first things Emeka Ihedioha did as governor was to destroy Akachi Tower, as if Rochas Okorochas built it with his money. I passed that monument shortly after it was tampered with, and the sight was disheartening. What manner of humans are we? In Kano, they brought down a flyover built by the former governor Abdullahi Ganduje because some folks with a low bandwidth of intelligence said the aerial view of the design looked like a Cross, a Christian symbol. Kano was a Muslim state and anything that smelled “Christian”—especially a structure close to the government house, the seat of political power—needed to be destroyed.

Kano governor Abba Yusuf’s demolition spate got to a head this January when some victims sued the state for N30bn. They alleged they had lost about 30 members and goods worth N260bn to the demolition. The governor agreed to settle out of court for N3bn. So, he not only cost the state lives and capital, he will still pay a token for what he broke. In Lagos, the Landmark Beach Beach on Victoria Island was demolished to give way to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, an ambitious public infrastructure project. The project had hardly been announced when they brought the business operating there down to a wreckage. We are quick to destroy like that because it is easy; it requires neither thinking nor empathy. We can find a way to build around those structures, but that will task the imagination we lack.

Unfortunately, a society that builds to grow does not destroy so frequently unless it is truly necessary. Why? Because, at the end of the day, what we call a developed society is a consequence of additive growth. You add onto what is on the ground, not make a habit of subtracting. At the rate we are going, we will end up merely circling on the same spot forever. We will build 12 things and demolish 13, and then wonder why nothing ever grows on this land.