Forced Evictions and the Claiming of Space in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. A Talk by Michael Uwemedimo

By Priscila Izar

As part of the CityLab’s kickoff events on February 1, 2019, Michael Uwemedimo gave two lectures about forced evictions and the claiming of space in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The morning lecture was at Ardhi University and the evening lecture was at the Dar es Salaam Center for Architectural Heritage (DARCH). Uwemedimo is visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London and Director and Co-Founder of Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP), a grassroots organization based in Port Harcourt. His lectures spoke about how the Nigerian state uses its military apparatus to maintain a political economy of oil extraction and enforce its own vision of the built environment in Port Harcourt, with the support of private corporations. In this scenario, forced eviction of communities living on non-surveyed land open space for new oil fields and luxury real estate developments in the city’s waterfront.

Forced eviction is not uncommon in Nigeria (Agbola and Jinadu, 1997). In Port Harcourt, roughly eighty percent of all urban production occurs on non-surveyed land. Yet historically, official mapping of the city aimed to serve private oil companies, legacies of the colonial regime. Therefore, the Port Harcourt’s actual geography, reflecting everyday realities of the majority of its residents, rarely registers on these maps. According to Uwemedimo, the invisibility of impoverished urban dwellers on city maps facilitates the state-led policy of forced evictions. In contrast, the filming of their displacement aims to help raise their voices and insert them in their own territory even as their houses and neighborhoods are being demolished. Images of their forced eviction highlight their existence and struggle. 

The work in which Uwemedimo is involved is not only expository but also propositional, supporting a range of community based activities, which goal is to redirect the appropriation of space, and political discourse, to poor urban dwellers, particularly through CMAP and Chicoco, a comprehensive community-based empowerment platform that involves a community center, radio station, floating movie theater, and participatory mapping project. 

Urban transformation in Port Harcourt and Dar es Salaam Compared

The audiences in both lectures reflected upon whether and how Uwemedimo’s accounts of forced evictions in Port Harcourt’s political economy of extraction applied to Dar es Salaam. Ardhi University’s Senior Research Fellow, Dr. Tatu Limbumba, asked about whether the accounts of eviction in Port Harcourt could also “capture the logic of state and private sector stakeholders,” so that their rationale for supporting the eviction of local communities while promoting new development, could be better understood. Uwemedimo’s response was that such an effort could be construed as a way to justify forced evictions, which seemed unreasonable as, in his words, “there is no way that forced eviction can produce positive outcomes.” However, critical analysis of political economies often require greater understanding of how state and private elite agents operate. This is achieved by interrogating their logic and exploring their operating systems and structures (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). 

In fact a premise of Uwemedimo’s work is that there is no state present in the low income communities that comprise the majority of Port Harcourt. In his view, the city as “an environmentally degraded place” results from such lack of state presence. However, the recusal of the state from precarious areas can also be interpreted as an assertive gesture; the absence of state is the government policy, and so it is disinvestment, which is eventually replaced by (re)development through forced eviction. Through such framing it becomes possible to argue that the absence of the Nigerian government in the provision of services and protection of collective welfare is the political choice of a state that chooses to prioritize private profit over protection of the collective welfare. Moreover it opens opportunities for comparing the politics of development in Port Harcourt and Dar es Salaam, and Nigeria and Tanzania. More specifically, it allows for inquires about how states and private corporations working in partnership in each of the countries approach property development and resource extraction as engines for growth, and the extent to which these strategies relate with eviction and other forms of dispossession. This is a rising issue in Tanzania, as urban communities living in fragile environments risk displacement with little or no compensation, and uncertainty about the livelihood of rural communities increases due to expansion of resource extraction based industries.

In the evening, once in small groups, audience members spoke of their own experiences of forced removal in Dar es Salaam, a very traumatic and event violent process, even if happening at a smaller scale, in comparison to Port Harcourt. Despite local nuances, the processes of eviction also permeate life in Dar es Salaam and other Tanzanian cities, and focus on a different region can help facilitate local debates.

Whether focusing on the opportunities, the challenges, or a broader range of dynamics associated with the transformation of Dar es Salaam, a debate about current urban change in other cities of the African continent is not only relevant but also timely. It helps put the transformation of Dar es Salaam and other Tanzanian cities into context, in addition, it helps increase the attention, and opportunities for debate about the urban condition, and the politics of transformation going on in these cities. While the work has just started, CityLab hopes to continue the momentum and involve groups that are not usually part of these debates.

Works cited:

Agbola, T., & Jinadu, A. M. (1997). Forced eviction and forced relocation in Nigeria: The experience of those evicted from Maroko in 1990. Environment and Urbanization, 9(2), 271-288.

Ferguson, J., & Gupta, A. (2002). Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American ethnologist, 29(4), 981-1002.