Tag: Makoko

Anytime of the day, the children are constantly on the water either to acquire education or to do business. Their lives revolve around the Lagos lagoon, and for two days SEUN AKIOYE followed some of these water children to find out what it means to live and work on water.

The waters of the Lagos  lagoon around Makoko on Lagos mainland where thousands of Egun people built their homes is hardly still, no thanks to a flurry of human activities like dumping of refuse or doing ones’ toilet directly into the water. But the major reason for this all round activity is the constant movement of hundreds of canoes across the river.

Because the only way to access the Makoko waterfront is by canoe, there is hardly a home without one; the more prosperous families have about two. There are others who rent out canoes to commercial drivers, they have more than three.

So on the river, there is hardly a still moment. Many of the boats are used for commercial purposes, mostly as taxis and are driven by children some as young as five years old. It is hard to find an adult commercial boat driver in Makoko, many of them are engaged in more profitable vocations like building of canoes, as dressmakers, pastors in one of the several churches on the river and the larger proportion of the community are expectedly fishermen.

On the morning of Thursday February 26, 2015 at Jesusemadegbe (Jesus commands) jetty, a canoe pulled to shore. The driver named John or as he is famously known in Makoko, John the deaf pulled up silently and helped his passenger disembark. In the middle of the activities at the jetty, John stood silently. He did not join the other children in shouting for passengers but waited painfully for anyone who will come towards him.

John was born deaf but some of his mates said he became dumb in his childhood; it is rather difficult to know the truth of the matter. His mates said he is about 12 years old and has been driving canoes in Makoko since he was able to row. Even though many of his competitors would credit him as the “best canoe driver in Makoko” and he works from sunrise to sunset, John the deaf hardly makes much money compared to his colleagues. This is understandable as even the few passengers he gets mostly cheated him in the transactions.

This is Makoko, a community of about 200,000 people consisting of mainly indigenous Egun people and a sprinkle of Ijaw and Ilaje. Makoko is hidden in the middle of Lagos mainland and it has the reputation of being one of the most deprived and blighted communities in the state. Makoko is divided into two, the waterfront and the mainland.

The mainland economy is largely dependent on the fish caught on the high seas by those who live on the waterfront where there are more than 200 houses built on stilts to accommodate almost 50,000 people including lots of children. These people have little interactions with the outside world; their existence depended on the water. And because of their peculiarities, thousands of tourists visit their community rowing on its dark and usually dirty water.

This is the unusual story of the children who run a part of the economy as fishermen/boys, boat drivers and itinerant sellers; they are called the water children.

The water children: Entrepreneurs, breadwinners

About a quarter of the population of Makoko consist of children under the age of 18 years. The high population of children may be due to poverty and on the average a family would have at least six children. The large population according to some of the residents could also be attributed to the prevailing profession in the area; fishing, as the children are ready source of labour to prepare and sell the fish caught by their parents.

Thus a large proportion of the children are engaged in some form of economic engagement to help their family. Because they live on the water, the children of Makoko are expert swimmers and canoe drivers. As early as three years or as soon as they are able to crawl into the canoes, they begin to learn how to paddle. Swimming comes to them naturally and there has been no report of any one of them drowning- at least not yet.

Every morning, young children paddled out to the sea either to attend school or to run errands. Others are also engaged as sellers of food stuff, or of fresh water which is scarce in the community. There are the fishermen or rather boys/girls too, those who set traps for fishes in the night and return in the morning to check the catch. But mostly, the major vocation of the children of Makoko is commercial canoe driving.

Almost all the children are engaged in this either full time or for those who attend some form of school on part time basis. In Makoko, three names stood out among the drivers: Eustache Avlessi (14), Joachin Noudenanon (15) and Pacome Messou (12). The three are friends and they attend the same school working part time during the week and full time at weekends or during holidays.

Joachin is the most enthusiastic of the trio. He has been paddling since the age of five and considers himself as a supreme swimmer. “There is no child in this community who cannot swim, we learn to swim from the time we were born. Because there is no other way to survive, we learn fishing and how to paddle canoes too.”

Joachin is very shrewd at business, every morning before school, he joins the horde of other children to hustle for passengers. They are mostly his fellow schoolmates and teachers and after the evening lessons he resumed at Jesusemadegbe jetty, picking passengers for N50 and N100. “At the end of the day, I make about N700,” Joachin said. The profit goes into his education.

Eustache runs his business using his mother’s canoe but his business hours are limited because of his school activities. “I start business by 5pm after school and make about N500 per day. This has not affected my studies because this  is what we do every time,” he said. Like Joachin, his profits go into funding his evening lessons at school.

Pacome fancies himself as the king of the canoe trade.  He began commercial canoe driving in 2012 using his grandmother’s canoe and he claimed to have made more money than his classmates. On one occasion, he made N1000 working from morning till night. It was the highlight of his career which he was very proud of. “I made N1,000 which I gave to my grandmother and she used it for my school.”

Pacome works every weekend all day but he is fortunate, many other children whose parents do not know the value of education or cannot afford it simply abandon school and take to full time work. Such is the lot of Monday Lokosu and his siblings. Every day, Monday paddles his mother’s canoe upstream; fetch five gallons of fresh water which he sells to willing customers. Each trip of five gallons fetches him a tidy N150. This trip is repeated about three times in a day and the proceed goes into feeding his family.

The water schools

Every morning in almost all the houses children dressed in school uniform filed by the edge of their stilt houses waiting for transportation to take them to school. This is the time Isaac Usu, a 13- year –old boy who has never been to school makes most of his money.

“I have never been to school because I do not have any money and my parents cannot afford the money for school. I will like to go to the English speaking school so that I can learn Yoruba and English, but now I cannot go to school because of money,” Isaac told The Nation as he increased the fury of his paddle.

He would stop at a house, pick up a student and move to the next. In this way, he collected five students and deposited them at the various schools. In one of the trips witnessed by The Nation he made about N200.  Isaac has nine other siblings and none is attending school, the money he makes from his boat driving goes into his family upkeep.

The Makoko schools do not follow the same arrangements as can be seen in schools in other parts of Lagos. Even though, the same curricular is taught to the students, they are modestly adapted to suit the peculiar needs of the children of the river.

The most prominent school on the river is Whanyinna Nursery and Primary School.  On a notice board that hangs on the building, the school address is given as Makoko Water Front Yaba and its motto is ‘Virtue and Hard work’.

Whanyinna School is built on a sand filled plot in the middle of the community close to the sea and it has very interesting story. According to the head teacher, Shemede Noah, the school was a donation from some white men who are members of the Yatch Club. The members promised  to build the community a school.

That promise was fulfilled in 2008 when a portion of the sea had to be sand filled for two months and the construction of the school costs N3million. After the school was built, there was the problem of a teacher. This was when Noah was called in. “My father is the head of this community and he has 22 children. I am the last born and the only one that was educated, so when the school was built my mother said I should come and help to teach the children as a contribution to my community,” he said.

But that decision didn’t come easy, after his secondary school, he had acquired new friends and had moved to another part of Lagos. Social life has also taken its toll, “It was very hard for me to move back here to the community but I had to do it for my people.”

Noah began with 72 children. It was a tough job convincing the parents to allow their children attend a school instead of helping with fishing or selling wares in the canoe on the river. But Noah had a trump card: “ I told them that if the parents of the doctors who treat them when they are sick, the lawyers who help them handle their cases had not allowed them to go to school, how will they be able to help us now. I told them about President Goodluck Jonathan who is from our kind of community, education made him become the president.”

Apparently, the lure of their children becoming president and doctors swayed the parents, soon the children increased. Initially, Noah taught them alone getting stipends of about N2, 500 from his father as salary, soon he employed other teachers. Today, there are 239 children in Nursery and Primary class with nine teachers. Salaries for the teachers-which range between N10, 000 and 18,000- is sourced from donors. Whanyinna is also the only English speaking school in the whole of Makoko waterfront. Noah makes up the school expenses from proceeds from his fishing boats.

But Whanyinna has a problem of space and so two classes are merged into one. For instance, primaries one and two occupy the same space likewise for primaries three and four. But one should not be deceived about the quality of teaching as pupils in Nursery one are already doing sums of addition and subtraction. There are other things which make Noah smile in the darkness of his room at night, 35 of his students are already in secondary school outside the community and at least a good number of them have a prospect of going further to the university. “They have formed an Old Students Association and some are in Denton Secondary School and are doing well,” Noah said smiling.

At 10: am, a loud bell rang and the students ran out forming an unruly line in front of food sellers in the school compound. It was the short break time. Being on water has its advantages, truancy is eliminated, almost. Once the canoes deposited the children in the morning, most of the commercial canoes only return at closing time.

Though Whanyinna is the biggest and the best equipped school in Makoko waterfront, it is not the only school. There are about 15 others which are French speaking, but the most prominent ones are Ecole Primaire Privee Thales and the Ecole Primaire Privee Saint Michel.

Eustache, Joachin and Pacome all attend Ecole Thales and are in Primary six. The school which is situated right in the middle of Makoko consists only of two buildings and like Whanyinna is built on reclaimed land. To get to the school, one would have to row along some narrow river course and meander between different houses.  Like the other school, two classes share a room and the students are about 150.  A flimsy cardboard divided the classes on either side, the black board is suspended by a rope.

Akokogbo Godday Josiah has been teaching at the school since 2008 and has risen to the position of the assistant head teacher. There is a vast difference between the Whanyinna and the French speaking schools. At Ecole Thales, the students speak  and study in French. They follow the French curriculum as provided for in Benin Republic where the students usually take their final exams.

When The Nation arrived at the school about 80 pairs of young eyes who descended on the reporter, stood up in unison and ranted several French sing song sentences to welcome the visitor. “Mercie, mercie” the visitor responded which generated loud laughter from the children.

In the class of Primary five and six, an interesting lecture was taking place, the trio of Pacome, Eustache and Joachin were in the middle of the class discussion. It did not look like a normal class, one that you see in English speaking schools but it’s like a participatory lesson. The teacher asked a question and Joachin raised his hands. Several hands followed, “moi, moi” they cried.

Akokogbo said the class is preparing for the entrance examination to secondary school in July. The examination will take place in Benin Republic and those who succeeded can proceed to a high school either in that country or in Nigeria.

“We have a secondary school here, it is called Etoile de la Disapora and the lessons are taught in French. There are English lessons too but once you pass that secondary school you will be qualified to either complete your education in Nigeria or in Benin Republic,” he said.

The model that works for the people of Makoko is a complicated but advantageous one. To retain their roots, the children’s primary education is in French, once they master the language, they can proceed to a secondary school and learn English. By their teenage years, they have been educated in English and French and they speak Egun and Yoruba at home. This way, they are at more advantage than their Nigerian counterparts who speak only English apart from their native language.

The children just returned from mid day break when The Nation arrived at Privee Saint Michel. The school was founded in 2005 and currently has 200 students attended to by four teachers. The head teacher, Lawrence Sozomey is very proud of his school but quickly admitted it is more of a tutorial class.

“We are French so we have to learn French, before now our children were  out of school but now there are more than 15 French schools in this place. This is not a full school but it is like a lesson,” Sozomey said.

Like the other schools, the Privee Saint Michel combines two classes together and consists of a single one-storey-building linked by a rather steep ladder. But there is another interesting feature of the French schools, students pay N50  for the lower classes and N70 for the upper classes per day  as Akokogbo  explained “ just for support”. In the evening, students pay N50 for evening lessons. In an average month, a parent would pay N1000 for tuition and N3, 000 for an average term. But there are other little bills to be paid and the real fees may be in the region of N5, 000 to N10, 000 depending on the class. But the teachers consider this as a charity because the fees are mere stipends compared with the quality of education the kids get. “If they can get quality education for less, why not?”  Akokogbo asked.

“I want to go to school, but I have to help my family”

The schools in Makoko closed at the same time. This means more canoe activities on the river. It is not unusual for traffic jams to occur as different canoes struggle on the narrow river roads to get to the schools. Isaac joined in the frenzied driving towards Ecole Saint Michel. Several children are waiting for commercial canoes, it would cost them N50 to return home.

But there are many others who will be joining their parents canoe, driven by an older sibling, one of such is Eustache and his four siblings. Soon their canoe arrived in front of their house and the kids climbed the steep steps into the house. Another canoe followed behind carrying seven school children, it was paddled by a boy not more than six years old, but he did it with such expertise and dexterity while the kids in the canoe sang.

Singing is an integral culture of the Egun and it is a beautiful sight to see school children singing in a canoe on the way back from school. Eustache and his siblings ate lunch in a hurry and began preparations for the evening classes. Their father, Jerrad, one of the more prosperous dressmakers in Makoko insists they must attend all the lessons available. Soon a lone canoe made its approach, driven by a little girl of about 10 years. Written boldly inside the canoe is Beatrice Agiah. Two bowls were prominent in the boat, one containing fried fish and the other, garri. The boat pulled to a stop in front of the Avlessi home and the girl began to make conversation in Egun. Her name: Vivian Sakar.

Vivian has never been to school and she understands only Egun language. She also does not aspire to be educated; her parents could not afford the fees. Her mother and grandmother sell smoked fish and everyday Vivian mounts her grandmother’s canoe saddled with fish and garri which she sells throughout Makoko. The profits goes into feeding the large family, without the contributions of Vivian, the family may go hungry.

Jerrad said there are hundreds of kids who do not go to school and have no hope of attending one. It simply costs too much, even those who wanted to learn a trade could not afford it, it is even costlier than education. There is only one way out- the boys become taxi drivers and the girls hawk in the canoe. For those whose families could not afford a canoe, they rent for N500 a day. Then it is a race to make enough money to pay off the cost of the canoe and make enough profit for the family.

The Nation caught up with one of the taxi drivers named Stephen. At the age of 14 years, he has never been to school and unlike many others, he is very streetwise and sharp. “Why do you want to know about me,” he asked while he flatly refused to be photographed.

“I cannot afford the fees, we are 12 in our family and none of us is going to school, even though I will like to go to school, but I have to make money for my family to help them. For now, this is what I have to do,” Stephen said in a voice that carried no emotions.

In the evenings, the Jesusemadegbe jetty becomes a beehive of activities, the full time canoe drivers are joined by those who had just returned from school. It was a mad scene, with children jostling for the few passengers at the jetty. John the deaf was there as he quietly waited for a passenger at a corner of the jetty.

Dansu Jeremiah was there too. He has just been admitted into Etoile Diaspora and he did canoe driving in the evenings to make up his school fees. Jeremiah has reasons to work harder than his colleagues because he pays more for his education, but on the evening of Friday 27th February 2015, things have not totally gone according to his plans.

Jeremiah rowed to shore with a lone passenger, she was an elderly woman and appeared to be in a form of argument with the driver. When she disembarked, she paid N50 and insisted on collecting a N20 balance.

“I didn’t meet the person I went to see and so he (Jeremiah) didn’t have to wait to bring me back, I cannot pay N50,” she yelled.

Jeremiah responded that the standard fare for a round trip was N50, his colleagues came to his rescue too. But the old woman would not back down; dejected Jeremiah offered the woman her fare back, preferring not to collect any. That was one of the hazards of the job, Jeremiah’s friend told The Nation. “Because we are children, the adults always cheat us and it is not fair,” he said, rocking slowly inside his canoe waiting for the next passenger.