Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lucie E. White is Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Jeremy Perelman is Lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.

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Stones of Hope

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword Jeffrey D. Sachs and Lisa E. Sachs.................................................................................................................................................................................xiContributors.................................................................................................................................................................................................................xixAcknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................................................................................xxvList of Acronyms.............................................................................................................................................................................................................xxviiIntroduction Jeremy Perelman and Lucie E. White.............................................................................................................................................................................11 A Place to Live: Resisting Evictions in Ijora-Badia, Nigeria Felix Morka..................................................................................................................................................172 Cultural Transformation, Deep Institutional Reform, and ESR Practice: South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign William Forbath, with assistance from Zackie Achmat, Geoff Budlender, and Mark Heywood.....................513 The Evictions at Nyamuma, Tanzania: Structural Constraints and Alternative Pathways in the Struggles over Land Ruth Buchanan, Helen Kijo-Bisimba, and Kerry Rittich.......................................................914 Freeing Mohammed Zakari: Rights as Footprints Jeremy Perelman and Katharine Young, with the participation of Mahama Ayariga...............................................................................................1225 Stones of Hope: Experience and Theory in African Economic and Social Rights Activism Jeremy Perelman and Lucie E. White...................................................................................................1496 The Long Arc of Pragmatic Economic and Social Rights Advocacy Peter Houtzager and Lucie E. White..........................................................................................................................172Epilogue Jeremy Perelman and Lucie E. White.................................................................................................................................................................................195Notes........................................................................................................................................................................................................................199Index........................................................................................................................................................................................................................239

Chapter One

Resisting Evictions in Ijora-Badia, Nigeria

Felix Morka

This chapter is the result of a dialogue between Felix Morka and Duncan Kennedy that took place at a Stones of Hope meeting in May 2008. It explores the threat of forced evictions faced by the residents of the Ijora-Badia community in Lagos, Nigeria, and the way their resistance created challenges, and also opportunities, for the community's development.

With a total area of about 160 hectares and a population of over 600,000 people, the community of Ijora-Badia is currently ranked higher than over one hundred other informal settlements as the most blighted community in Lagos. It provides a compelling example of a community's long struggle for a place to live against persistent efforts of government and city managers to forcibly evict them. The Badia story illustrates how an unbridled use of the combined political power of the state and the financial muscle of the World Bank can aggravate the poverty of target beneficiaries. While highlighting the repressive force of these actors, the chapter also examines the community's creative use of human rights to transform their consciousness and bolster their capacity to resist power asymmetries at the root of their deprivation and marginalization. The chapter also demonstrates that by challenging eviction, communities like Ijora-Badia can amass significant power and resources, which can potentially enable them to remap their development over the long term.

* * *

In 1973, three years after the end of the country's civil war, the federal military government of Nigeria acquired a large tract of land comprising a sprawling old settlement known as Oluwole Village in Iganmu (central Lagos) for the purpose of building Nigeria's National Arts Theatre. The theater was to be a key edifice gracing the African Festival of Arts and Culture, which Nigeria was to host in 1977. The festival was one of several sociocultural events convened to showcase a unified and resurgent Nigeria poised to tackle the challenges of reconstruction and development after a three-year civil war that claimed the lives of over one million people.

The grandiosity of the theater only masked the brutality and injustice meted out to the local landowners. In a sequence of events that is becoming increasingly familiar throughout the developing world, the federal military government, without adequate notice or consultation, forcibly evicted the Oluwole villagers from their ancestral homes. Following largely uncoordinated protests by the residents, the federal authorities retroactively paid paltry sums to some of the evictees as compensation for their demolished homes. Other evictees, who insisted on resettlement, were allocated vacant plots of land, measuring on average 9 meters by 15 meters (30 ft. by 50 ft.) in Badia, a community located less than one kilometer away. A final group of evictees was abandoned to find their own means to build new houses for their families. Many built sheds made mostly of stilts and corrugated iron sheets of various shapes and sizes, as each family could afford.

Prior to the displaced persons' arrival, Badia was already inhabited by the ancestral land-owning Ojora chieftaincy family, their assignees, and tenants. From the 1960s through the late 1970s, Badia had also become home to other populations displaced by development activities, such as major road and bridge construction and industrial layouts.

The federal military government failed to address the host community's (Badia's) preexisting severe lack of basic social and economic infrastructure, such as water, roads, drainage facilities, a solid waste disposal system, healthcare facilities, and schools. The unplanned relocation of the Oluwole evictees to Badia only worsened an already dire situation. These exacerbated social, economic, and environmental deprivations have come to characterize and continue to frame the heightened blight levels in Badia.

The urgency to rebuild Nigeria's infrastructure, which was devastated because of the country's civil war, an...