By Awaal Gata
The question of whether Abuja should be only for the rich is recurring in the psyche of the residents.
It is made more rife recently when the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), through its Special Task Team on City Cleaning and Management, revealed that it arrested 166 destitute, 636 hawkers, 50 prostitutes as well as impounded 863 motorcycles, 432 tricycles in two months.
The team, which is headed by the FCT Commissioner of Police, Joseph Mbu, was formed on March 17, 2014 “to enforce sanity in the city.”
The FCT Minister, Senator Bala Mohammed, reportedly toured the city and surprisingly saw “elements” and “menaces” that his Directors and Heads of agencies were reporting to him that the city was rid of, hence formed the task force to “clean” and “manage” the city.
But as the task force carries out its responsibilities, the residents, mostly the low-income earners, are thinking it is a scheme to chase the poor out of the city.
Hamza Musa, a ‘mai shayi’ in Wuse, said he would relocate his tea joint to Mpape soon because he had been served with five notices by the task force and Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) to leave his present joint.
Having known the modus operandi of such task force and that of AEPB, Musa believes if he does not quickly comply by relocating, his joint would be demolished and he would also be arrested.
But despite the fact that he has agreed to peacefully relocate, he sees the action as a ploy by the rich to send the poor away from the city.
“They don’t want the poor around them, that is why they are chasing us away. They don’t know that they can’t live without us,” he lamented in Hausa.
A middle-aged woman who gave her name as Jumai was almost arrested by the task force for recently. Her offence was hawking of boiled corn on the karb of a highway in the city.
According to her, “I ran and ran to avoid that arrest that day. The price I paid was losing the basin of corn I was selling for the day. It was about N7,000. I left it behind so that I wouldn’t be arrested and eventually paying five times above it.
“But the FCTA should know that some people rely on that corn to live. For me, it is my way of earning a living in Abuja. Some of the buyers cannot afford the expensive foods that they sell in the city, and eat corn to their fill. If I am not provided with an alternative, how am I expected to live? If the buyers are not given another option, how will they cope.”
Corroborating Jumai, another hawker who pleaded for anonymity said: “if they don’t want us to hawk, they should give us alternatives. They should give us jobs; if we have good jobs like the government officials, who would want to hawk? Anybody that you see hawking, it is because there is no option.”
However, Mr. Joseph Njoku, a human right activist, lauded the FCTA for coming up with Mbu’s task force committee, saying that Abuja needs to be as clean and orderly as possible because capitals of other nations are and Nigeria’s should not be different.
He lamented the lawlessness displayed by motorists on the roads which the task force has been battling to curb.
According to him, “the traffic on the roads of a federal capital should flow well but in Abuja it doesn’t, just because the motorists don’t want to heed to the law. Compelling them to heed to law should be in high priority. I see no problem on the part of the FCTA in terms of this.”
Njoku also sees nothing wrong in the total ban of motorcycles and tricycles in the city centre.
“Tricycles and motorcycles don’t befit Abuja. They will cause problems on the roads. Go to capitals of other nations you will se nothing as such, how so impoverished they are.”
However, he believes that the Administration needs to address the issue of hawkers with tact. Just like the hawkers, he believes the FCTA must proffer an alternative before moving to stop them from plying their trades on the street.
He suggested that the FCTA should either employ the hawkers, give them shops to sell their wares or upgrade their standard of living by training them in skills and giving them a start up capital which would make them loathe street hawking.
“There are ways that the FCTA can make them to hate hawking on the street. Some of them can be employed. Some can be given shops in which they can sell whatever they have to sell and some should be trained in SMEs and given capital to start up. Someone with good way of living wouldn’t want to hawk,” Njoku said.
He, however, was with the view that the FCTA needs to contract a consultancy firm to advise it on the issue, because it is never easy for the government to “sanitise a city, especially a city in a country with huge poverty like Nigeria.”
