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Makoko is the perfect nightmare for the Lagos government – a slum in full view, spread out beneath the most travelled bridge in west Africa’s megalopolis. Yet this city on stilts, whose residents live under the constant threat of eviction, has much to teach

“One bucket, one life,” says Ojo, puffing on a marijuana rollup. We have stopped by the Floating School, a two-storey solar-powered wooden structure that floats on the Lagos lagoon on a bed of plastic barrels. I ask him to explain what he means. It’s the young fisherman’s way of summing up the dangerous exertion that is his part-time vocation: sand dredging off the coast of Makoko, the world’s biggest floating city.

The dredgers, he explains, descend a wooden ladder into the depths of the lagoon, armed with only a bucket and the will to live. The depths to which they go mean total submersion. Then they have to climb out with a sand-laden bucket that will be emptied on to the floor of a boat. When the boat is piled high with wet sand – high enough so that it’s on the verge of sinking – it sails to shore, from where the sand is loaded on to trucks, for delivery to building sites around the city.

On this, my fourth visit, Makoko is as I’ve always known it: the tiny “jetty” from which visitors and residents board dugout canoes into the labyrinths of the floating settlement; the grey-black sludge that passes for lagoon water; the tangle of boats impatiently slithering through the labyrinth of waterways, making the traffic of Makoko reminiscent of the notorious Lagos roads. Then there’s the hustle and bustle of human activity: women smoking fish or peddling food and bric-a-brac; half-naked children rowing their own boats or playing on the verandas of the wooden shacks; congregants in white garments, singing and dancing in impromptu churches on boats.

Makoko is also the perfect nightmare for the state government – a slum in full view, spread out beneath the most travelled bridge in west Africa’s largest city. Everyone who flies into Lagos to do business on the Islands is likely to find themselves passing over the Third Mainland Bridge. For a city keen to re-create itself as forward-looking, Makoko is a dismal advertisement, and the government knows this. It is, therefore, ever keen to pursue the seemingly easiest solution to this “embarrassment”.

On 16 July 2012, four days after the State Ministry of Waterfront Infrastructure Development issued a 72-hour quit notice to residents, a band of machete-wielding men laid siege to Makoko’s buildings. Five days later, according to the Social and Economic Action Rights Centre (Serac, a legal advocacy group for underprivileged Nigerian communities threatened with forced evictions), the assault escalated: the demolition workers set fire to targeted structures and deployed armed police who allegedly fired gunshots indiscriminately. One resident was killed, shaming the demolition workers into suspending their efforts. By then, 30,000 people had been rendered homeless.

An estimated 2,000 people enter Lagos every day, many ending up in informal settlements like Makoko. It was founded as a fishing village in the late 19th century, by immigrants from the Egun ethnic group. As its population swelled and land ran out, they moved on to the water. Today Makoko is home to people from a variety of riverine communities along Nigeria’s coast.

Water world

The area known to outsiders as Makoko is actually six distinct “villages” spread across land and water: Oko Agbon, Adogbo, Migbewhe, Yanshiwhe, Sogunro and Apollo. The first four are the floating communities, known as “Makoko on water”; the rest are based on land. The appellation used for the collective, by the Lagos State Government and NGOs, is Makoko-Iwaya Waterfront. But both sides are united by the water, upon which they depend for livelihood, as well as the Yoruba language, which serves as a lingua franca in a settlement where multiple languages are spoken: French, English, Yoruba and Egun.

From the Third Mainland Bridge – the fastest route from the island “downtown” to the airport – Makoko looks serene. Wooden shacks stand on stilts, as boats named Bejamin, Gbenon Nu or Ahude glide across the still water. Amid the evening rush-hour traffic on the bridge, Makoko basks in the dull orange light of the setting sun, a soothingly familiar presence.

Close-up, though, it throbs with the kind of energy that marks Lagos out and has made it a darling of urban theorists. Makoko shares with Lagos the exceptional situational inventiveness that makes the entire city tick. Take the matter of clean drinking water: criss-crossing the lagoon bed are pipes, paid for and laid by enterprising residents to bring in clean water – for a modest fee – from boreholes in neighbouring Sogunro.

The population estimates vary widely, from 40,000 to as much as 300,000. “Nobody knows, there’s no [credible] data available,” says Monika Umunna, of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, one of the most active non-governmental organisations at work in Makoko.

Presiding over various parts of the waterfront are local chiefs, known as Baales. One of them is Emmanuel Shemede, crowned in 2005 as the Baale of Adogbo Village. His territory contains the only two primary schools: Whanyinna Nursery and Primary School, founded in 2008 by his younger brother Noah; and the floating school, which has generated more positive buzz for Makoko than any other thing in recent years.

Baale Shemede’s house is built from wooden planks, and rises, like every other structure here, on stilts out of the brackish water. On the ground floor are two sections: one his living quarters, the other a Baptist church that he gifted to a missionary friend. The Baale wants to know why we are visiting. His voice carries a hint of guardedness, which is not surprising to me.

I have now visited Makoko enough times to realise just how wary its people have become of the “tourists” – many of them white – who stream past, cameras in hand. In the minds of Makoko’s children, the long-lens DSLR camera has come to symbolise white privilege. Some call out “Yevo!” – “white person” – to my companion, the black Nigerian photographer Andrew Esiebo.

There’s a widespread feeling that many of the people who come to Makoko to take photographs do so to make money off it – selling photos or stories to raise funds from which the people of Makoko will never benefit. Some of the wariness is also self-protective: the community has had to face up to government officials displeased by the embarrassment they believe photographs from Makoko attract.

Resistance

This embarassment is what spurs demolitions like the one in 2012. In the last few years, Lagos state has seen several. Badia, a swampland settlement on the edge of the city’s Apapa Port, was one of the worst-hit targets. More than 15,000 people have lost their homes.

“The idea that the government can simply push people from their homes, with no discussion, no recognition of decades of residency … seems unfortunately normal in Lagos,” says Robert Neuwirth, who lives in and writes about informal settlements like Makoko around the world. “The authorities in Lagos seem to approach city planning from an authoritarian point of view – as if their desire for development transcends everything.”

There was a strong push back against the 2012 demolition. Two months later, a Serac housing affiliate known as the Urban Spaces Innovation began work on a regeneration plan for Makoko. It was meant, they said, to be “a community-led and people-centred development model”, and brought members of the community together with academics, non-profits and international consultants. In January 2014, USI submitted the plan to the Lagos State Ministry of Urban and Physical Planning.

“The people of Makoko told the governor that we have a plan to develop the community,” says Lookman Oshodi, a USI project manager who helped develop it. “Governor Fashola said, ‘OK, if you’re saying you don’t want to go, go and bring us your plan, let’s look at it.’”

Oshodi says the regeneration plan achieved two things: “One, it put the demolition and forced eviction on hold. If any government wants to carry out demolitions in the community today, the people will say ‘But you’ve requested a plan, and that plan has been submitted, so what steps have you taken?’ Second, the plan was able to outline various strategies for redeveloping Makoko into a livable and sustainable community.”

Not everyone is a fan of slum redevelopment or plans for regeneration. Neuwirth bristles at the idea of deliberately transforming slums into models of urban development. “Why can’t communities simply be communities and develop in the organic way that we allow other communities to develop?” Pointing to Brazil’s favelas and Istanbul’s gecekondu communities, he says: “They are inspirational in that people have developed them themselves, without government and real estate types pushing them around. Without a doubt, they still have problems. But they are stabilising themselves and, over time, knitting themselves into the fabric of their cities. This is a true marvel of global urbanism.”

It is also a marvel that, for a crowded community that sits on a fetid lagoon, Makoko’s biggest health challenges are not communicable diseases such as cholera, but non-communicable diseases: malaria, respiratory diseases and malnutrition. In the absence of antenatal care, childbirth is also a major challenge. Residents, however, hint of an immunity to epidemic. “The government thinks that this will be a hub of disease, there’s nothing like that,” Baale Emma told me in 2014 at the height of the Ebola scare. “We don’t have cholera here. No epidemic here. Go and check the hospitals.”

There are none. Doctors Without Borders opened a floating clinic in January 2011; although very popular when it launched, it stayed open less than a year. Today Makoko continues to be served by a network of informal, unregistered clinics that attend to basic ailments. There are also a number of traditional birth attendants who deliver Makoko’s babies in an atmosphere of high levels of maternal mortality. Oshodi tells me of an ongoing plan, led by Arctic Infrastructure, an engineering company he founded, to build a healthcare centre with support from the government of Switzerland. “The community will build it, we will supply drugs, staff and equipment,” he says.

A real community

There are three possible options for Makoko’s future. First is that it goes the way of Badia East, razed for high-rises, or Bar Beach, site of a massive land reclamation project that is turning nine square kilometres of Atlantic Ocean into what developers are touting as “the Manhattan of west Africa”, a residential and commercial mini-city called Eko Atlantic. Lagos is starved of land, but has no shortage of property developers; were Makoko to sink (or be crushed), in its place would rise apartment blocks and villas priced out of the reach of all but the wealthiest Lagosians.

Second is that the government will stop obsessing with demolition and focus instead on providing the infrastructure that citizens expect of their administrators – hospitals, schools, electricity – and allow Makoko to develop in its own way and at its own pace, as Neuwirth recommends.

Third is a middle road of sorts: the implementation of the regeneration plan, a collaborative compromise between residents, civil society groups and government. The floating school may have acted as a catalyst here: built using local labour, with financial support from the UNDP, it was nominated for the Design Museum’s Design of the Year Award and has become Makoko’s most famous and popular building. “The floating school has been adopted by the Lagos State government as a model that’ll be used for developing the houses on water in the community,” says Oshodi. In 2013, Kunlé Adeyemi, who designed the school, told me: “Eko Atlantic is about fighting the water; [here in Makoko] we’re saying – live in the water!”

Nine months ago a new governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, took office in Lagos. Makoko’s fate in the new regime is unclear. The Baale thinks politicians’ first terms are periods of respite: no one wants to needlessly alienate critical voting blocs when there’s a second term to be won.

“It would seem sensible, before engaging in rhetoric and planning about redevelopment, to come to a full understanding of what’s actually there,” says Neuwirth of Makoko. “The smokehouses, and the circuits of importing that bring the fish there to be smoked. The home building industry. The boat building industry. The businesses that bring clay and laterite for landfill. Whatever the politicians and developers might think of it, Makoko is a real community, built by the families that live there. It is valuable to them – and to the city as a whole.”

Drone footage by Adekanmi Ojuri and Oxford Brookes University

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