Improving Slum Dwellers’ Lives, A Myth
As the Millennium Development Goals get to its end, the question on the lips of many Nigerians concerned about housing development is: What progress has so far been made at improving the lives of slum dwellers in Nigeria?
The global pact called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a declaration that covers a broad range of issues such as peace, security and disarmament, protection of the environment, human rights, democracy and good governance, and development and poverty eradication.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organisations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.
These all-time goals were adopted at the Millennium Summit held in New York in 2000 and was reassessed in September 2005, when Heads of State and Government met at the United Nations in New York for the 2005 World Summit (Millennium Summit +5) to review, among many other global issues, progress made in achieving the Millennium Declaration which had been adopted at the Millennium Summit.
One of the cardinal goals in the MDGs is the Goal 7: Achieving Environmental Sustainability. Indeed, the MDGs constitute an interconnected agenda for action, and making inroads on the environmental goals of MDG7 is essential to sustainable progress in meeting the other goals.
This is particularly true of target 10 and 11 which are aimed at halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation and achieving, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Slum at its simplest, is ‘a heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor’. Slums have different nomenclatures, in Brazil, it is refereed to as Flavelas, in North America, it is the hood or ghetto, Russian: Trushchobi and Turkish: Gecekondu.
Whatever the term, all slums have a common denominator: deprivation. In Nigerian slums, water provision is nothing to write home about, sanitation is appalling and poverty is taking its toll on residents; which is not merely in financial terms, but poverty of stability in income and productive assets, poverty of access to essential services, and poverty of power, participation and respect and this makes Nigerian slum residents to be trapped in an adverse spiral of impoverishment and disease.
Deprived of these essential attributes, slum dwellers (whom are already deprived of adequate shelter) are not be able to realise their full capabilities, and therefore are not able to benefit from, contribute to and have an influence on development.
This no doubt will prevent the country from achieving the MDGs. Much of the poverty in slums is as a result of lack of adequate housing and infrastructure that are necessary for people’s basic needs, to enhance better productivity.
The fact is that adequate housing and infrastructure (which slums lack) are essential parts of the economic production of settlements. The absence of these will not only have impact on slum dwellers alone, but also on other settlements and the nation at large, since slums are economic and social engines in urban settlements.
Measuring progress towards this target in the MDGs has proven to be a challenge for Nigeria. Looking at how well the MDGs have impacted on the lives of slum dwellers in Nigeria, analysts point to the fact that we are not making any meaningful progress.
Slums are on the increase in all Nigerian urban centres, and the trend of slum growth in Nigeria is worrisome. Statistics available shows that as at 2010, Nigerian slum residents are over 50 million which is an increase from the 2001 figure of 41,955,000 and a 1990 figure of 24,096,000.
This invariably means that about two-thirds of the population of Nigerians live in what might be called a slum: in owner-occupied or rented housing in irregular settlements at various stages of consolidation, in traditional makeshift structures, in pauperized public housing projects or in other types of minority dwellings on roof-tops or in shacks on forgotten bits of land here and there.
With the looming end-line of the MDGs, the question again is, how achievable are the set-goals and targets in the face of the myriad of developmental challenges facing Nigeria?
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