Decay reflects national decline
It was once a place so full of middle-class promise that locals called it Paradise Village or Little London, for its orderly grid of streets, palmy boulevards, parks and new apartment buildings painted in pastel greens and blues. Lion statues marked one entrance to the suburban enclave on the bushy edges of Lagos, and an iron gate marked another.
“It used to say, ‘Welcome to Festac,’ ” said longtime resident Victor Udoh, 38. “Now just look at it.”
He walked under a rusted yellow bar heralding the barely recognizable place that his neighbourhood has become: a grid of lightless streets and decaying apartments where water hasn’t run since 1995, generators buzz all day and people cram into one-room living quarters that used to be called “face-me-I-face-you” but are now called “face-me-I-slap-you” because of how harsh life can be.
Nigeria is often associated with two things: the Boko Haram insurgency and oil. But the fragility of Africa’s most populous democracy is also evident in the daily grind in neighbourhoods such as Festac, where residents have watched corrupt officials sell off public parks and buildings, basic services vanish and life otherwise erode into the every-man-for-himself hustle that Nigerians fear will be their country’s undoing.
“Festac town is like Nigeria,” said Toni Kan, a writer who is working on a novel about Lagos. “Big on promise, dismal when it comes to fulfilment.”
It began with a big party. The government built Festac town to house musicians and artists who came to Nigeria for the pan-African cultural extravaganza called Festac ’77, a kind of Woodstock for the continent underwritten by Nigeria’s booming, newly nationalized oil industry.
Like the festival, the town was meant to be point of pride, a showcase for the kind of society that Nigeria’s government could deliver. Festac had its own post office, power station, police and fire departments. It had a sports club, health centres and public schools. It had streetlamps that flooded light onto sidewalks in the evenings. After the festival, the government held a lottery, and soon here came the Udohs, the Nwonus and the Ikes through the gates and into the freshpainted apartments and bungalows.
It was hardly the only middle-class neighbourhood in Lagos, but it was one of the most deliberately planned, and until the mid-1990s or so, the government could be counted on to haul trash, maintain grass and run red buses that took commuters to and from work.
“I thought it was the beginning of everything,” said Udoh, recalling how it felt growing up here, wearing a crisp uniform to school, imagining a future in business or government. “When we were young, the government would always say, ‘You are the future of tomorrow.’ Now we just try to make our own strides, because if you wait for them, you’ll starve.”
Recently, he said, the government sold a town water tower to a Chinese businessman who has connected pipes and metres to the apartments, but few residents have signed on.
“We don’t trust it,” Udoh said, explaining that people are afraid the man will jack up prices. “It’s too good to be true.”
Stephanie McCrummen writes for the Washington Post