The Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency (LASURA) has disclosed that 169 slums have been identified in Lagos, and 8 of them are earmarked for regeneration.
The Head of Public Affairs, LASURA, Adeola Olagoke, disclosed this to The PUNCH during an exclusive chat at the agency’s office in Lagos State.
She said: “169 slum communities identified e.g. Badia, Magbon, Obawole Agege, Olusosun, Alaba Rago, Obun Eko, Makoko, among others; 49 mapped out, e.g., Mazamaza, Agidingbi, Otunmara, among others; 12 profiled, that is, Ipodo, Isale Oja, part of Oregun, among others; 16 declared on national dailies as slum communities, and 8 earmarked for regeneration, which includes part of Alausa, part of Olusosun, part of Bariga, and others.”
Earlier in June 2023, a professor of Urban Management and Governance, at the University of Lagos, Taibat Lawanson, at the 21st inaugural lecture of the University of Lagos, revealed that Lagos had over 157 slum communities deserving of attention.
Lawanson said: “The figure of the slums in Nigeria’s commercial capital city was recently profiled by the Committee on Slum Identification and panel by the Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency and the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation.”
Speaking to our correspondent, the Managing Director of Fame Oyster & Co. Nigeria, Femi Oyedele, said regeneration of slums would help in breaching the housing deficit gap in the state.
He said: “Slums are squalid human settlements. They are communities with great opportunities in their locations to Central Business Districts or commercial precincts. They are called slums because they have substandard houses, poor service houses, and buildings that are not maximally utilised.”
According to Adeola Adenikinju in ‘Bridging Housing Deficit in Nigeria: Lessons from other jurisdictions’, slums typically cropped up around centres of economic opportunity, no matter how rudimentary.
Adenikinju suggested that slum regeneration was the best solution to slum eradication.
He further said it was a big mistake to see slums as a problem, adding that to bridge the housing deficit gap in Nigeria which authorities said was between 17 million to 28 million, the country needed to look into slums regeneration, especially in Lagos State where there were over 150 slums serving as homes to over 20 million people according to a report by Human Rights Watch and Justice and Empowerment Initiate on July 28, 2021.”
