Unrest fears rise as Lagos extends COVID lockdown
LAGOS: Bus driver Christian did not sleep at all last night after Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari ordered an extension to the lockdown in his sprawling home city Lagos to halt the coronavirus. A few hours before the announcement on Monday evening, word spread that over a hundred youths from a criminal gang were swarming through his neighborhood of Alimosho on a robbing spree. “Everybody was scattering for their lives. We ran away and I locked myself inside the house,” he told AFP, refusing to give his surname.
“When it was calmer, with the men on my street, we organized ourselves. We didn’t sleep all night. We prepared weapons, collected knives, what we could find.” The authorities insist that extending the shutdown in Africa’s biggest city to one month is vital to stop a virus that has so far caused 343 confirmed infections and 10 deaths in Nigeria. But residents in the usually
frenetic economic hub of 20 million, where more then half rely on daily earnings to survive, complain they have been left facing crippling economic hardship and rising crime.
‘I was so scared’
In recent days, inhabitants in a string of districts across Lagos and neighboring Ogun state have reported a surge in gang attacks. “The criminals have been taking undue advantage of the lockdown to dispossess people of their valuables,” community leader Mufu Gbadamosi said. He has organized people in his Agbado area of Lagos into groups to man checkpoints and screen people coming into their neighborhood after dark. “We shall continue to hold the night vigil until the end of the restriction,” he told. Local resident Dotun Alabi said it was the hunger and desperation caused by the lockdown that appeared to be pushing people into crime.
“When we arrested two boys, they told us that they took to robbery in order to find something to eat,” he said. Inhabitants in the overcrowded neighborhoods of Lagos’ poor-where millions live squeezed togetherare no strangers to gang violence as criminals frequently fight for upper hand. But Chioma Okoro, who has bunkered down in her home in the Agege district, said insecurity had grown in the past two weeks and ratcheted up dramatically over the weekend.
“Now it’s three times, 10 times worse,” she said. She had tried to go out with her husband to get supplies but dashed back when she saw a group of young men brandishing iron bars, machetes, and homemade firearms. “I was hearing gunshots yesterday evening, I was so scared,” she said. —AFP