ASO CHRONICLE

The community is replete with houses made from zinc and wood materials. Only the chief’s house, mosque, school and few houses are built from bricks. Local wells serve as the main source of water while schooling takes children kilometres away on a deplorable road.

Electricity supply at the rundown camp is a luxury though electric poles and cables present a false impression of the community. The cables and poles were installed about seven months ago, but residents still use flashlights and local lamps.

There are three boreholes in the community, but all have packed up and the segregated residents have to drink well water.

The community’s school has been managed without government intervention for over three years, and its classes stop at primary four.

At their present location in Karmajiji, an urban slum few kilometres from Abuja’s City Gate in the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), their struggle for survival in an ‘unfriendly environment’ continues.

While the men sweat daily to put food on the table for their families, the women lament the travails of childbirth.

With no visible signpost to welcome visitors to the community, it is completely hidden from public view, and its sorry state seems not to be pricking the consciences of the super-rich Abuja residents.

Though not far from the National Park, it is hard to imagine that a large number of physically challenged people live in their secluded world in one corner of the opulent city.

The chief of the physically challenged people, Alhaji Suleiman Katsina, said that for over eight years, they have been left in the community to fend for themselves.

Alhaji Katsina, who is also the leader of the physically challenged people in the entire Federal Capital Territory (FCT), said that while they waited on government to fulfill its promise of relocating them to a permanent place in Gwagwalada Area Council, some of them depend on able-bodied relatives and friends to survive. Others, he said, did menial jobs or petty trading, selling stationaries on tricycles.

For eight years, Ahmed Abubakar, another physically challenged, has been at the disabled colony. The secondary school certificate holder said he ‘manages’ at the community because he had nowhere else to go.

He fends for his aged mother from