i wonder how on earth that Some people will not mind their own business, Imagin a reporter featuring our capital in such manner.
When one of Nigeria’s long line of
military rulers, General Olusegun
Obasanjo, seized the land on which Abuja
was to be built in the late 1970s, he could
hardly have imagined that the city would
remain unfinished 35 years on. Abuja has a makeshift, haphazard feel to
it: A place of bureaucrats and building
sites, its streets eerily empty after the
buzz of Lagos or the enterprising bustle
of Kano. It is one of the most expensive cities in
Africa, and one of the most charmless. The skyline is dominated by the space-
rocket spires of the National Christian
Centre and the golden dome of the
National Mosque, facing each other
pugnaciously across a busy highway at the
city’s centre. Its other striking landmark is the vast
construction site of the Millennium Tower,
which, if it is ever completed, will be
Nigeria’s tallest building. The skyscraper was intended to mark
Abuja’s 20th birthday in 2011. Now
delayed until who-knows-when, hugely
over-budget and the subject of numerous
official investigations. The National Mosque stands at the side of
a busy road in the city centre
All the people of Abuja have to show for
the billions invested in the project are
two stunted fingers of scaffold-clad
concrete. I had been in Abuja for three days –
about two-and-a-half too many – when
my friend, Atta, a sociologist, picked me
up from my hotel. We drove out towards Aso Rock, the
monolith looming over the presidential
palace. On either side of the road there are
complexes of bulky, imposing mansions,
most of them unfinished. Some had empty swimming pools; others
had mock-Tudor timbering, but were
windowless and often roofless. Atta told me that 65% of the houses in
these developments were uninhabited,
put up only to launder Abuja’s dirty
money. Like the Millennium Tower, these
grandiose schemes are ruins before they
are completed, bleak monuments to a city
built by kleptocratic politicians on stolen
land. We pulled off the Murtala Mohammed
Highway at Mpape Junction, and
immediately the road deteriorated. There are many uninhabited mansions
near Aso Rock
“I am going to show you the real Abuja,”
Atta told me, as his car struggled up a
deeply-rutted dirt track. A warm wind from the desert to the north
– the Harmattan – whipped clouds of red
dust around us as we climbed through
rocky scrubland into the hills. Mary
People began to appear on the streets –
men carrying ancient Singer sewing
machines, women balancing baskets on
their heads. We entered a vast shanty-town of shacks
with corrugated iron roofs, slums stacking
to the horizon. Nissan minivans scuttled past – they are
called “One Chance” buses, as they barely
stop on their manic journeys through
these uncharted streets. Crowds thronged between skinny cows,
beneath posters advertising beaming
televangelists. Dance music blared out, interrupted by a
muezzin’s call to prayer. Bright-eyed
children kicked footballs about. This was the home of the Gwari people,
the original inhabitants of the land where
the capital was built. Hundreds of thousands of them were
summarily evicted in the 1970s, and now
scrape a living in the hills. Many of the original owners of the land
around Abuja are now living in poverty
Abuja is itself a Gwari word and, although
the city of generals and politicians below
us had barely 700,000 inhabitants, two or
three million people live in these shanty towns, many of them Gwari. The Gwari people continue to fight for
compensation for the land wrested from
them by the Obasanjo government, land
now worth more per square kilometre
than almost anywhere else in Africa. We got out and walked through the
smoke and dust towards a row of shacks. In one of them, a woman knelt on the
ground plucking a chicken, a man above
her leaning on a makeshift bar. They were Frank and Mary, Gwari people
in their thirties, children of one of the
thousands of families originally evicted
during the foundation of Abuja. The four of us sat in the shack sipping
Fantas, staring out at the swarming life
of the shanty town: Motorbikes and cattle
and people, all of them through a veil of
reddish dust. “I trained as an architect,” Frank told me.
“I have an education. But I do not have
money, I don’t know the right people. So I
work here with my sister. In Abuja,
money defines everything.” I ask him about the empty mansions
lining the roads into the city. “That is pseudo-Abuja, a false place. It’s
unjust – we should be living in those
houses. Instead…” He gestured to the
squalid lean-to that jutted from the back
of the bar. Mary looked up from her chicken. “Life
here is difficult,” she says. “Often we can’t see across the street
because of the smoke and dust. If it rains,
you can’t move for the mud. But we pray
hard.” Thick dust and smoke often fill the streets
Frank pulled out a CD. It was Fela Kuti’s
Suffering and Smiling. “This,” Frank said, as the music coiled out
from an ancient hi-fi, “is the compressed
statement of Nigerian society. We suffer,
but we smile. Nothing will change until
we get angry, until we stop smiling.” A storm was coming in, red clouds rolling
overhead and thunder crackling down the
valleys.

was our capital built on stolen land?