For some obvious reasons, the suburbs and satellite communities often bear the heaviest brunt of internal migration as thousands from rural areas continue to swarm cities in search of better opportunities. Such migratory pattern inevitably swells the population of these locations and puts an increasing pressure on public utilities, making such places seem, more or less, like the fabled poor cousins of their more swanky urban neighbours. The influx to the outer fringes of cities is mostly driven by practical consideration than anything else. For the average home-seeker on a low income bracket, aesthetics is hardly ever a priority subject; what matters, apparently, is the knock-down property rates on offer.
With crumbling tenements and overstretched facilities, suburban and satellite communities are usually not the poster images of cities that authorities crave. Yet, the reality is that the majority of cities’ population live in these areas. Also, their typically large population implies an inherently massive voting bloc which politicians can only ignore at their peril. This is a fairly familiar experience for most cities of which Enugu is not an exception.
So why does giving such areas the necessary makeover they deserve always seems like a near impossible task in the light of these facts? The answers are merely conjectural. However, besides being a task that simply overwhelms, the sheer scale of the projects needed to create any tangible impact might make social interventions in these places barely noticeable.
But sometimes, it’s simply a question of a failure to sufficiently muster the political will. To a large extent, the condition of slum settlements is often a bitter highlight of the chasm between rhetoric and action.
The paradox of satellite communities – the notion that they are places politicians visit only during election campaigns – has lately experienced a paradigm shift in Enugu with some ambitious urban renewal projects launched across many such neighbourhoods by the state’s helmsman, Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi. The governor’s intervention offers a glimpse of the sort of incremental turnaround that would have occurred in blighted communities had they been over the past years given the kind of attention the Ugwuanyi administration has devoted to their upgrade.
There are a number of such neighbourhoods in Enugu metropolis and they all bear visible vestiges of decades-old neglect: A prominent locale in this infamous club is Abakpa-Nike, an urban-sprawl-gone-awry in the Enugu East Local Government Area and home to an estimated five hundred thousand residents, roughly one-third of the capital’s entire population. This
community over the years earned a reputation which was more or less a byword for squalid living condition and it’s not difficult to see why: overcrowded buildings, deplorable state of connecting roads and scant regard for physical planning rules.
But thanks to the new resolve to give the requisite attention to areas long overlooked in past development plans, Abakpa-Nike is experiencing an unusual facelift. Potable water which residents once accessed only via commercial vendors now flows in parts of this sprawling community. This is in addition to the series of ongoing infrastructure upgrade meant to rehabilitate and open up link roads in Abakpa. The state government last year awarded
contract for the construction of five roads in the area comprising Edward Nnaji street-Ogwuagor road; Amaetiti street-Ugboye Abakpa-Nike road, and Abakpa-Nike market road.
This drive is unlike the tokenism which residents of fringe communities had lived with for decades. The current experience is rooted in deep planning, not the perfunctory gestures of the past that lacked conviction and were barely sustainable. The intervention, as conceived presently, comes with a clear social and economic development plan that incorporates the state government’s immediate, short and long term goals. For instance, the extension of pipe-borne water into parts of Abakpa-Nike arose out of the state’s water board’s expansion of its capacity from 4,000 cubic metres to 18,000 cubic metres. The goal is to achieve 40,000 cubic metres by year end and extend water supply to all parts of Abakpa and indeed every neighbourhood in Enugu metropolis and substantially cover other parts of the state.
The renewed vigour is consistent with Ugwuanyi’s often-stated vision to implement an even spread of infrastructural projects to give rural residents a high self-esteem, banish feelings of alienation and create new cities to reduce the current pressure on the state capital.
“We will continue to direct our policies and projects towards these locations because that is
where most of our people reside,” the governor said at the flag-off of a road rehabilitation project at Ngenevu, a high-density suburb straddling the foot of hills across which lies an abandoned coal mine.
This declaration is as much driven by belief in the public good as it is by the knowledge that an improved living condition is an incentive for payment of taxes. Such conviction is at the heart of the N5m-project-for-every-community initiative, a grassroots development programme conceived by the Ugwuanyi administration to ensure government presence in the 450 autonomous communities in the state.
“This is a special development that has never happened in Enugu State,” the chairman of the Enugu State Traditional Rulers Council, HRH Igwe Lawrence Agubuzu, had said of the programme that gives community leaders and residents the latitude to select a project to be sited in their communities and fund same with the money released by the state.
As urban renewal projects extend to more communities like Iva Valley and Ugwuaji that had long lived with similarly bitter tales, cynicism which was once the default mode for residents is gradually giving way to optimism and a rekindling of a new social consciousness.
This has, not surprisingly, bred a robust engagement between the government and the people whom the governor never fails to acknowledge as the “true heroes of democracy” So it is in some sense an implicit affirmation of the social contract and an understanding that governments should be obligated to always act in the people’s interest. Such mindset feeds the democratic culture. And it’s just as well that has, along with an unrelenting commitment to an inclusive ideal, surely taken firm roots in Enugu State. There could indeed be no better response to cynicism than good governance a point sufficiently proven by Governor Ugwuanyi.
- Ani, a former editor of ThisDay, The Saturday Newspaper, and later Saturday Telegraph, sent this piece from Enugu