A mother of five, Anna Sobie’s wooden home is one of many that has been demolished in a shanty town in a lagoon in Lagos, with critics describing it as a “land-grab” by the authorities to gentrify the prime waterfront spot in Nigeria’s biggest city.
Lagos State government officials deny the allegation, saying they are demolishing parts of Makoko - the country’s biggest informal waterfront settlement - because it is expanding near high voltage power lines, posing a major health and safety risk.
Sobie and her children now sleep on the narrow broken platform where their house stood until a few weeks ago on Lagos Lagoon. This is the biggest of 10 lagoons in a mega-city that is facing an acute housing crisis - and where life is becoming increasingly expensive, pushing more people to the margins of society.
As Sobie spoke to the BBC, canoes - steered with paddles or long bamboo poles - moved through the narrow waterways, carrying mattresses and sacks of clothes belonging to the displaced people.
Same as bulldozing homes in Gaza, in my view:
Find people who have nearly-nothing, & destroy what little they DO have,
& use what you take from them for reinforcing the wealth & “authority”-over-others of those who did the demolishing+taking.
The root-guru of the Christians was a guy who got physically-violent on the people running the temple as a commercial-operation…
He spoke pointedly about how the wealthy had no access to The Kingdom of G-D, Within, because their wealth was their true lord…
Nothing changes: Roman Empire, or nowadays: same values, same principles, same pseudo-“uprightness” of establishment.
Until circumstance has enforced that human-nature, ie collective-unconscious, as Jung called it, change, profoundly,
… then … still nothing will have changed.
“Bandaids” & “makeup” do not make a skeleton ( humankind’s actual-nature ) change from 1 kind to another.
It’ll be end-of-century before the ocean-of-wars we’re manufacturing has force-changed any of our racial-meaning, significantly.
Until then, this kind of class+racism’s going to remain normal.
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