At a glance from the NPA Expressway, the David Ejoor Barracks, Effurun-Warri, Delta State, the home of the 3 Battalion of the Nigerian Army, reveals freshly painted walls, a beautiful iron gate guarded by plain-clothed and uniformed stern-faced soldiers.
A stroll further into the military community through the secured gate will reveal well-manicured lawns edged by trimmed bushes and orderly trees. The main road into the military community becomes two a few yards later. The two branches reveal deliberate attempt to keep them well-maintained, howbeit through unconventional means – with broken bricks, stones and other debris.
Advancing into the heart of the barracks, to the left is the office of top ranking officers, including the Commanding Officer (CO) and his principal officers; to the right is the way to the ‘B Company’ and other formations. This building, like most structures around the area, is spotting fresh paint and is edged by orderly shrubs amidst verdure vegetation and neatly lined trees that provide shades and ensure that the offices are perennially cool.
It is a perfect picture of how an army barracks should look. The tidiness extends to the areas inhabited by the CO and other high ranking officers of the formation and it about ends there.
But, what you see from the outside is mere aesthetic that ends as one moves westwards to the ‘A Company’, one of the residential areas of the real David Ejoor Barracks. Several rows of rotten, decaying bungalows stand out in stark contrast to the scenic beauty at the beginning of the journey. From a distance, this area looks like a ghost town, long forgotten and disused. The houses are aptly located near the cemetery where those who fought and died for their country are buried – mostly in unmarked graves.
The buildings here seem desolate and abandoned. They are long, endless mass of bricks and woods with leaky roofs, decaying surroundings, overflowing cesspools, faulty plumbing and lacking of every comfort that an apartment should provide.
As one moves closer, he will begin to feel the buzz of life. This doesn’t look like a military residential area but like a refugees’ camp or a slum in any of the government abandoned parts of the country. In some areas it is difficult to tell how the buildings formerly looked because of the presence of several foreign matters added to support them.
As you move even nearer, you are hit by the strong repulsive stench of decaying human wastes mixed with bathwater and indiscernible smell of rotten food, faeces and others. As one gets acquainted with the ugly, putrid site and smell, he begins to understand the topography of the mess. Greenish dirty pools are formed by water from pits and septic tanks that have caved in. Some residents make feeble, fruitless efforts to patch up the mess of pits. Others ignore the squalor, accept their fates or are immune to the deadly mixture of bath water, sewage, faeces swirling around them.
corporal, who spoke to our reporter on condition of anonymity, said he was recently deployed to one of the northern states but could not concentrate on the task because he constantly received reports of one problem or the other.
“Na so we de see am everyday. Any time I comot, my wife will call me to say that they didn’t sleep last night because of rain water entering the house. What we used to block the ceiling had been blown off. Sometimes it is because the windows are broken or any other problem.
“Wetin man go do? Na where our government put us and we must remain for there until situation change. That is what we have been hoping for since. Even me ma, I don tire but how I for do. We must endure until Allah answers our prayer but the condition is very bad, walahi,” he said in an admixture of English and vernacular.
In one part of the barracks a group of teenagers played football on heap of dirt. One of the young boys waded through the green puddle to retrieve the ball and then playfully splattered the water on his colleagues. He told our reporter that they are used to filth but noted that the rainy season is the most difficult time for those who live in the barrack.
“If you look around, you will see that the soak-away pits are all broken and there are pits everywhere. If you do not know the area very well, you might fall into the pit and break your legs. It happens, it is real.
“When I was younger, I fell into one of the pits; I could have been dead, but for my friends that quickly rushed to get help. By the time I got out I had drank from the dirty, shit water,” he said.
Some of the building walls have collapsed and the foundations are caving in and falling apart due to the effect of the water from faulty plumbing work, collapsed drains and other factors. The unlucky inhabitants of such houses use plywood, corrugated sheets, cardboard papers and any other materials they can lay their hands on to fill the gaps on their walls.
The roofs are in worst shapes; trampolines, cement bags and other emergency cover inhabitants have outnumbered the Super-7 asbestos roofing sheets that were originally used when the houses were built over 30 years ago.
“I have done my best,” Agnes (not her real name), told our reporter as she cleared utensils from her makeshift kitchen built with sticks and plywood besides her home.
“I have been in this barrack for years now and there has never been any kind of maintenance since. All the patches on the wall, the pits and anything around here are done through self-help. Any household that feels they cannot take the situation, raise money and do whatever they can to improve their environment. So, any new brick work, attachment or roof you see on any house is done by those who live there.
“Every time it rains, we have huddled in the least leaky room and the next morning my son would climb to identify the leaking spots and get cellophane or trampoline to cover them. But these days that provides no consolation because the wood and roofing materials are so bad that sometimes the covering we put to stop the rain would just cave in from the weight of the water,” Agnes added in smattering English.
Our findings revealed that social services in the barracks have deteriorated over the years leading to the collapse of the public water supply system and waste management. Refuse heaps dot every corner and roads in the residential areas. Each block of flats has its own ‘refuse grave’ where they bury their household wastes.
It was gathered that the refuse grave became fashionable years ago when waste was posing health threat to inhabitants of the barracks. Soldiers and their children would usually dig pits of about three to six feet deep. Wastes generated by the households are dumped in the pits.
“When the pits get full, we use the sand we dug out from it to cover it up and then we move to another pit. That is how we have been managing our wastes for years now,” a junior ranked soldier told our reporter also on strict condition of anonymity.
A source at the barrack said living condition at the barracks plunged deeper in the early 2000s when Commanding Officers and other high ranked officers started living outside the barracks.
“When Gen Elias Zamani was brought here to head the Joint Task Force in 2003, he was the highest ranking officer but he never spent a night in the barrack. Instead, he stayed somewhere in Bendel Estate (an exurb civilian estate in Effurun). Most of the officers are provided plush hotel accommodations so they do not know how the junior offices are faring,” our source added.
When contacted for comment on the deplorable state of the barracks, the Commanding Officer of 3 Battalion, Lt Colonel Bassey, denied angrily that the barrack was in a deplorable state.
The CO, who spoke in a short telephone conversation with our reporter on Monday afternoon, retorted with series of questions: “When was the last time you visited the barracks? What did you come to do? How do you know the place is very dirty? I am very sure that it is not this barracks that you are talking about. Have you seen the renovation that is going on in the barracks and you are telling me that the barrack is dirty? Look, my friend, don’t get me angry with you,” he said before he hung up the phone.
Lt Col Bassey, who was clearly angry about the question, alluded to the maintenance works that were ongoing at the officers’ quarters and administrative buildings of the station, which unfortunately, had yet to get to the living areas of the junior officers at the time of this report.
Speaking in his defence, a middle-ranked officer said: “The CO just came a few months ago and this rot has been on for several years. You do not expect one or two leadership change to alter it. But in fairness to the current man, he his vigorously undertaking maintenance work. He should be commended.”
Although our checks revealed that Bassey and his predecessor, Lt Col Ifeanyi Otu, have taken active steps to change the fortune of the garrison, the magnitude of the rot and the pace of work are light years apart.
Besides, it was gathered that the true situation on ground at the military post is hidden from the military high command in Abuja. A source said the pace of the maintenance is exaggerated when the reports are being made, adding, “When they complete the renovation of a building, they will say they have done five and at the end it is the junior officers who suffer.”
