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Inside Lagos slum where female violation is daily affair

By Lawrence Enyoghasu

“I was coming from an errand, when some boys attacked me from behind, I could not shout because they hit me with an iron, it was a sharp pain and I was dazed. When I regained consciousness the miscreants were trying to pull down my pants. By then, my mouth has been gaged and I could only smell the oily substance and the pain on my jaw. They had rounds of sex until they were tired and I was blind folded. I saw their faces but I never recognised them, when I came home, mother was angry that I wasted valuable time to go on an errand,” Edun, 18, narrated.
Kajiat, 14, has something similar. “I was in the room lying on my brother’s side when the hoodlums forcefully entered the room. My brother was asleep but I was not, they entered and pointed their local guns at my brother and the cutlass at me. They first asked for money but we had none and they decided to have something else. When I tried to struggle with them they corked the gun to shoot my brother. I love my brother so much and I don’t know what I would tell my parents. As they were doing it, I was begging them to stop and not to harm my brother.”
The two rape victims are residents of Otoilogbo extension community in Lagos. Hardly a week passes in the community without at least a young lady being forced to a corner and raped. Like Edun and Kajiat, the girls in the community are traumatised. They succumb to fear of being killed.
Fear has become the constant comapnion of residents in the community which is located behind Costain in Surulere area of Lagos State where a self-imposed curfew was on. Parents have told their children not to leave the house or the vicinity of their houses once it is 7pm. The young ladies have become suspicious of any new face they see in the community.
According to one of the girls in the area, Kemi, she won’t stand and talk to anybody she does not know. “Every lady here is mindful of who she talks with because the tale of guys in this area is becoming alarming,” she stated.
While the lucky ones are praying not to fall victim, the victims are finding it hard to integrate into the community.
Saturday Sun gathered that the boys perpetrating the act are usually from neigbouring communities. “Most of these boys are thugs from other communities, they are evil. They watch and strike when no one is looking,” says Chairman of Ifesowapo Community Development Area, CDA, Rasheed Mammud.
He added that the frequent incidents of rape and robbery are symptoms that the community has been forgotten by the state government  even as they are up to date in  their yearly levy to the state government.
“What is glaring is that the state government has neglected us. Every year we pay N5000 as CDA dues. Since last year, some boys have been coming to our area to rape our girls and cart away our belongings,” he added.
On how they help the rape victims, Mammud said that a certain clinic has always been helpful to the community and that they also donate stipends. “We donate money to the victims, it is not always much but it is our way of assisting. Also Star Clinic has always been helping out. The clinic does not only treat our rape victims, but also other unfortunate claps,” he stated.

Robbery in the community
Surprisingly, the boys do not care who their victims are, they even attacked Mammud and he was robbed. “I was also robbed. They took my phones and money,” he stated with fear in his voice.
From investigation, Saturday Sun gathered that like rape, robbery is also on the increase, there is hardly a day that someone would not lose an item or money, sometimes they are held at gun point and robbed. The robbers could easily disappear because they always come in large numbers and they attack simultaneously.
According to a resident in the area, Pa Jimoh, “when they attack, you can’t make noise because they might be holding your neigbour, they come anytime, mostly when they know that our youths are not in town.”
As Pa Jimoh stated, Secretary of the community, Agbodemu Ishola Musbau, also testified to robbery and rape incidences. But he believes that “the crime rate is just reducing. There are boys who will come to this community to terrorise us. On average, in a week we always have a case of robbery, rape and other things.”

Eyesore
The slummy community is an apology; the narrow entrance to the community is filled with waste. From observation, the wastes were dumped there to soak the excess water deposited there, which would then be filled with sawdust. The air was filled with carbon monoxide. The community contains around 15,000 residents who all live in shanties, each shanty contains at least five persons.
The community lacks social amenities including electricity.  The only school in the community, Young Leaders Academy, serves as school in the morning, the entrance is used as shops in the afternoon and room in the night.
According to Musbau, life left them with no choice but hardship. He added that the community deserves more from the government. He argued that the government is just interested in evicting them. He said that the government had tried to evict them but they survived and won the case in court and since then, they have only been on their own.
“You can call the community the poorest of the poor as you can see it falls within the developed environments like the National Theatre, Iddo House and Main Land Hotel, we have been here since 1996. Our staying here was not by choice but we live in this community to create something out of nothing. The government has failed in its responsibilities of providing shelter for us. Lagos State might claim thousands of millions in population most of them reside in slums like our community and Ajegunle and so on.
“Recently the government marked our houses for demolition, it took all our resources and help from outsiders to stop them. We won on the basis that since it can’t provide alternatives, we should be left alone,” he stated.
He stated that surviving has not been easy since then; they have adopted different surviving strategies even to the extent of tasking themselves. He agreed that their situation has made them vulnerable to crime.
“We are vulnerable but despite that we are still making things work for ourselves. We put up the bathroom. We have three bathrooms and three toilets; we also charge N10 to maintain it,” he stated.
He added that they have only one primary school in the community, “We have school also. The school stops in primary five. When they are done with class five we send the kids to neighbouring schools.”