By Rotimi Fasan
I AM not a frequent visitor to Abuja and on the few occasions I’ve been to our capital city since General Ibrahim Babangida  hurriedly jumpstarted the transfer of Nigeria’s administrative capital from Lagos following the June 12 troubles of the mid 1990s, memories of my visit have always been dim.

I can hardly recall anything of my visit beyond the fact that Abuja is basically a civil service city. I can’t even recall exactly when and why I was last in Abuja prior to my visit there in the middle part of last month. Which goes to show the degree of my disconnectedness to the city.

I doubt if I’m alone in my impressions of Abuja. Although the city has grown from its former sleepy state to a relatively bustling place, hardly anything has happened to break it out of its ‘civil service’ aura in which it is enveloped. The thing about Abuja is that it is a city with not much in terms of either character or soul remaining, as it has always been, an artificial outgrowth in the putative centre of the nation. Beyond its

official status as an administrative capital, Lagos had the capacity to leave something of itself even on the most casual visitor such that they look back with either of two emotions- love or disgust. This is not the same thing as saying that you don’t ever want to come back again after a first visit to Lagos.

No! Only when you do choose to call back you do so knowing what you are in for. But you never leave without something of Lagos in you. Which is far more than one can say for Abuja which remains but like a traveller’s inn, a market-city from which the sojourner impatiently hopes to return home.

Not even the so-called permanent residents of Abuja, top civil servants, politicians and business persons remain in the city beyond the weekend. The city practically shuts down Thursday evening and all roads lead to different parts of Nigeria from which the traders that populate the Abuja market came from at the beginning of the week.

The politicians and government contractors misnamed business men and women who own the many mansions in which they try to live out their artificial lives in the rat race that misleads many into thinking Abuja is the Nigerian city to be- these traders return to their ‘country’ homes where they live normally with normal human beings.

Perhaps, the only permanent residents of Abuja, the people who truly stay back to keep the city from what would have been a well-earned tag of ghost town cannot live in the city as they too have to return each day to the ‘outer darkness’ of the outskirts into which they have been banished to survive in the fast growing slums that would soon make Maroko look like Sunset Boulevard.

Abuja is a divided city, an artificial creation of officialdom to keep the rich and wealthy away from the poor and wretched. Maroko was not a deliberate creation- it grew over time when people tried to find a foothold in a part of a city that demanded more financial might than they could command.

Those who couldn’t stay in the richer sections of Victoria Island and Ikoyi simply moved over to places like Maroko on the edge of the Atlantic. Gradually the British-created richer part would expand to the poor part bringing into sharp relief the starkness in the relative state of both areas.

It was an indictment of the rich and all their stolen wealth that such poverty as Maroko represented could exist side by side Ikoyi and VI.  They realised they had to act fast and found a ready ally in the military regime of Raji Rasaki whose bulldozers would do what no elected government could. Indeed, the government of Lateef Jakande had tried to make the poor and others in the middle class sharers in the luxury that VI repre

sented by constructing low-cost housing estates for them. But the military would rather halt such encroachment by the poor. Abuja is a different story. Its foundation rested on the lie that Nigeria needed a capital that was at the centre of the country in order to give all a sense of belonging.

Yet, what one sees from the moment the city started was the deliberate plan, carefully executed, to keep the struggling majority out of the promised benefits of a centrally located capital. For all the crude oil wealth that has been expended on making Abuja a model capital, it ought to show more by way of development.

As I write this from the Moroccan city of Rabat, it is obvious that a lot of what supposedly went into the development of Abuja went into the bottomless bog of private pockets. Of what we can see- what makes many open their mouths sometimes in the surprised belief that Abuja represents a modern, 21st century city, there was and still is an unseemly concentration on the so-called city centres- Garki, Wuse,

Asokoro, Maitama etc. A drive through these areas of Abuja might lead the unwary to conclude that Abuja is indeed a well planned modern city. But that impression is soon erased when it is realised that all these areas put together constitute the centre of official government business and in terms of land mass represent a minuscule compared to the outposts of so-called life camps, sprawling slums of ill-planned structures in Nyanya, Karmu and Gwagwa, etc, from which the majority commute to the heart of the ‘city’ daily.

The sharp contrast between the ‘city’ areas and the ‘life camps’ by which I mean the poorer sections of Abuja makes one wonder what was the real reason behind the move to Abuja in the first place and why, after this move, no serious attempt has been made to create room for the relatively poor to find places of abode in the city areas.

Even junior government workers have to ‘find their level’ outside the city in the slums in which they congregate with others in depressing-looking, uniformly constructed, two, three and four bedroom structures. Some of the low-cost houses I saw on a previous visit in parts of the city centre I hear have decayed over time.

Soon they would be demolished and the inhabitants required to move to the life camps. I heard of how some highly-placed official thwarted attempt of a Chinese consortium to construct high rise buildings for low income earners which could help fill the vast empty spaces of Abuja.

Access to land needs to be democratised in Abuja and until this is done and some of the artificial barriers put in the way of normal human interaction are removed, the city would remain a crab- all head and no body.