Osigwe Braimoh was just eight when soldiers came with guns and horsewhips, threatening, beating, and flogging people as they guided and guarded bulldozers, that reduced their community, including his father’s house where they lived, to heaps of rubbles.

Although Mr. Braimoh’s mind was too young to comprehend what happened that day, he is struggling under its effect 20 years later. It changed the course of his life.

“I was very small then, but I can remember some things. I can remember my father telling us that we have seven days to quit our house. Nobody took it as serious. But exactly on the seventh day, they brought caterpillars, soldiers, armoured tanks; if you don’t go in quickly, if they catch you, they will put you inside, they will take you away.

“The issue made us to stop school then, I stopped school. We slept outside for three days before moving to one of my brother’s place in Fadeyi. After the demolition, say six days later, my father died. I lost my dad and since then, I am just alone now struggling with my widow mother,” he said.

Although they escaped the physical molestation of the soldiers, Mr. Braimoh’s oldest sister couldn’t cope with the pressure they faced in the following days; she died a few weeks later, leaving him and two siblings with their mother. The family had lived in a flat with 16 rooms built by their father, who had a big tailoring business. The house was partly occupied by their tenants. After the July 14, 1990 forced eviction, ordered by the then military administrator of Lagos, Raji Rasaki, the family packed into a room apartment at Ikota, an abandoned estate, in Lekki.

Queen Meregwae, one of the evicted residents of old Maroko, was a widow and had to keep her job at Commercial Medicine Store and still did petty trading. She also, sometimes, sent some of her five children to hawk. Three of them are now graduates, but are yet to be gainfully employed.

“Then, the leaders went to see Raji Rasaki’s mother to tell her son to see to our situation, but before they came back, the bulldozer, the army, have already moved into Maroko, demolishing, starting from Sand fill. I was able to carry my children away, though I’m a widow then. It has been very difficult, even for the children to go to school, it has been difficult. But thank God for these 20 years; we are still alive; the children are now grown up,” Mrs. Meregwae said.

Painful memories

“Many people died then because of stress. Some put to bed under the bridge; they could not survive their babies; they died. So many things happened, I don’t know how to narrate them. Even Raji Rasaki said that after two weeks they will not hear of us again, but thank God, today is 20 years, and we are celebrating it and we will celebrate more years, in Jesus name,” Mrs. Meregwae prayed.

At the event, to mark 20th anniversary of the eviction, Samuel Aiyeyemi, the leader of the Maroko Evictees, said about 10,000 houses were demolished and about 300,000 people displaced by the eviction.

“Today, not less than 100,000 of us have died prematurely as a result of the 1990 evictions. Today, our families still remain scattered, and the education and lives of our children substantially damaged. We are being made to spend our last days in abject poverty, homelessness, harassment, and hopelessness” Mr. Aiyeyemi said.

The location of the old Maroko, between kilometre 8 and kilometre 13, on both sides of the Lekki-Epe expressway, which was declared unfit for habitation, is now occupied by expensive commercial and residential estates, while some of the Maroko people were given flats in uncompleted buildings in abandoned government-owned Ilasan and Ikota estates in Lekki. Some, like Mrs. Meregwae, were not so lucky; she went to live in a ‘room and parlour’ apartment at Ajegunle.

Faced with another eviction

Without any government input all these years, the two estates have grown into slums, contrasting its immediate environment, which is reputed as being reserved for the affluent. And once again, they face the threat of another eviction.

However, the people are hopeful their case, championed by the Social and Economic Right Action Centre, SERAC, at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Lagos High Court, will yield positive result soon enough.

Nevertheless, nothing can erase the scare on Mr. Braimoh’s life or heal the pain he still feels. He is an electrical technician living with his mother in a room at Ikota estate, while his elder brother is struggling to make ends meet as a street photographer in Abuja. So as to have a graduate in their family, he and his elder brother worked to support their mother to train their only sister through university; an achievement he is proud of.

“For me, I have all my papers, but there is no money to sponsor me to the university. If not for what happened, I would have been able to do all these things easily,” he said in a soft voice.