It is no longer news that rural areas in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) are facing infrastructural challenges. Infrastructure is quite developed in the city centre but go to the satellite towns and rural areas, you will hear that there is no electricity, roads, potable water, healthcare facilities and even schools.
One of the rural communities suffering these acute infrastructural challenges is Pegi. Right now, what readily makes Pegi comely is the over 200 of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from the Chibok, Borno state, that t is housing.
In terms of infrastructure, it has one health centre, a primary school, one Junior secondary school provided by the past FCT administration when it was headed by Sen. Adamu Aliero.
The community has a borehole as the people’s only source of drinking water, but when our correspondent visited at the weekend it was packed up. A member of the community who simply gave her name as Jamila told Blueprint that because the borehole is no longer functional, they relied on the village’s stream for water.
She said they knew that drinking stream water could cause waterborne diseases but “as it is not everybody can afford to buy drinking water, those like me who can’t afford to buy have no any other option. The grace of God will help us out.”
Even to earn a living is a problem in Pegi. Speaking about it to Blueprint, an 18-year-old Joy Basiru, mother of two and visibly pregnant with another child, said she goes to farms, hawks firewood and works as a labourer to survive.
As at the time our correspondent met her she was happily lifting pans of sand to fill a house under construction with a child loitering nearby. Reacting to why she has to work that hard, she reveals that life is hard and one must do what she has to do to survive According to her, “all I know how to do is farm, but I can no longer do that because the government of the FCT came and took away our land, paid us paltry sums and relocated us here.
Now we have to go far away to rent plots of land on which we can carry out our farming activities, life is very hard here and with two mouths to feed, one cannot just sit down,” she laments.
Young Abigail, looking like a 40- year- old woman said her husband who is a mason can rarely get a job that will pay for their daily needs, so she has to work hard to supplement his efforts.
“He sometimes has to go into the city to look for odd jobs but we cannot afford that often because it costs as high as N200 to get a bike from here to the city.”
Speaking about life in Pegi she says, “No road, no light and no water and even our houses are without toilets.”
She said defecation is done in the open or nearby bushes, and as a result, diseases are common among the children.
While Abigail’s situation is not peculiar to only her, it goes a long way to tell us about the implication of government taking up agricultural lands for high rise buildings for the rich, with very few industries which could mean job creation and poverty alleviation.
Aside the obvious poverty that can be witnessed in Pegi Community, the large concentration of hewn firewood arranged in most households tells it all. This provides fire for cooking in the households but also shows the high risks of environmental degradation this could portend. With virtually no trees left standing, the community looks like a disaster waiting to happen if any sort of flooding ever occurs in the area.
Efforts to find out why a community so close to the heart of the nation is so retarded has revealed an obvious lack of government intervention in the community.
In an interview, the community head, Irimiya Sarki, lamented that “the community was greatly challenged, even as government had failed to reach out to them”.
According to him, “I have written severally to the Chairman of the council, but he has not responded and they are the ones that sent all these people here.
“In this community we have IDPs from Chibok, we also have people who were relocated from Karimo and Idu by the past administration; they are all here and we have all been living very peacefully but there are no amenities to make life easy.”
Despite these challenges, the community, like every other Nigerian community celebrates several festivities, which once in a while, brings the whole community together.
Chief among these are wedding ceremonies and annual festivals.
Efforts to speak with the chairman failed, but a member of the Kuje Area Council who spoke on the grounds of anonymity said, “The area council is greatly challenged in terms of funding and there is little or nothing we can do.”
