Dele Aderibigbe writes on the degeneration of Makoko, a Lagos State riverine community, concluding that this development has robbed the country the chance of making a Venice out of the area.MAKOKO is a small community of the highly hospitable, but remarkably poor. The people present a first time visitor a picture of what life must have been like in the villages in days gone by.Ready to greet and ever willing to respond, the community with its wooden make-shifts buildings comfortably sitting atop water vividly reminds one of what life must have been in Venice, the Italian dream city for lovers.Unfortunately, while the Italians developed their own environment and lined it with great architectural houses and gondolas, the Makoko settlement has remained seemingly abandoned, forgotten and mocked!Those who spoke to the Nigerian Tribune said the settlement came into being in the 18th century, largely with the Eguns, and the Ilajes. But today, the population has swollen to over 100, 000 people, expanding to accommodate also the Ijaws and some Delta Ibo. But they all speak the Yoruba language fluently, even though members of each tribe continue to teach their wards the mother tongue.It has government presence, if the construction of a borehole and non-motivated schools are anything to go by.'The community here is actually a microcosm of the country Nigeria. It is actually what government's neglect is all about,' a resident, who simply identified himself as Olufella Ajayi indicated, calling attention to the fact that most of their streets were either opening into the lagoon, or end up in cul de sacs; a major reason the streets are called 'close.'They live on water. And their main occupation is fishing. They, however, have created and named streets on the river like you may find either in the Delta creeks, or the Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. They visit their friends and neighbours using canoes; and for those living in opposite houses, one may use children constructed plank-bridges, at one's own risk, because they could actually easily give way without notice.While they may be fully protected from flood when it rains, they nonetheless still dread the rain, because poverty ensures that most of their abodes leak, while the refuse, dregs and other poisonous wastes from the lands are carried by flood directly into the lagoon, either suffocating the fish or further driving them away from desired locations.But how could the people complain, when the community itself also defecates into the same waters, perhaps to feed the fishes.The development of Makoko perhaps should have been championed by the Federal Government, through many of its agencies which include the Nigerian Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA). But NIWA has no time for the community. And the state government may have been discouraged by the fact that only very limited tax could be collected from a community which lives on water, except it intends to recruit and send its special swimmers and divers into such tax drive initiative. The returns may not justify the risk!Consequently, irritated by abandonment and frustrated by enduring neglect, the people have continued to wallow in the slum, power outages, sanitary problems and overcrowding, with many residents surviving only on subsistence fishing.While some first time visitors may erroneously consider the people as violent, in-depth study showed that this is not so. The three officers found at the Makoko Police Post also confirmed this much, when the Nigerian Tribune sought their opinions.'The people are very friendly. They are very peaceful people and crime rate here is low,' one of them volunteered, pleading for anonymity because he had no authority to speak to the press.It was learnt that while helps do come the people's way, like when an NGO group, the Hope Floats Initiative, a brain child of one Akin Afolayan, a Nigerian living in Atlanta, and a group of young Atlanta architects erected an amphibious clinic/community centre, in partnership with Architecture for Humanity, Atlanta and the Yaba Local Government Development Authority, Lagos, Nigeria, in 2009, such graciousness is not an everyday affair.So, for how long would Makoko, a 200-year old fishing village, mostly constructed on stilts above the Lagos Lagoon, remain essentially self-governing, with very limited government presence' Time will tell.
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