A mother of five, Anna Sobie’s wooden home is one of many that has been demolished in a shanty town in a lagoon in Lagos, with critics describing it as a “land-grab” by the authorities to gentrify the prime waterfront spot in Nigeria’s biggest city.
Lagos State government officials deny the allegation, saying they are demolishing parts of Makoko - the country’s biggest informal waterfront settlement - because it is expanding near high voltage power lines, posing a major health and safety risk.
Sobie and her children now sleep on the narrow broken platform where their house stood until a few weeks ago on Lagos Lagoon. This is the biggest of 10 lagoons in a mega-city that is facing an acute housing crisis - and where life is becoming increasingly expensive, pushing more people to the margins of society.
As Sobie spoke to the BBC, canoes - steered with paddles or long bamboo poles - moved through the narrow waterways, carrying mattresses and sacks of clothes belonging to the displaced people.
For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
Same as bulldozing homes in Gaza, in my view:
Find people who have nearly-nothing, & destroy what little they DO have,
& use what you take from them for reinforcing the wealth & “authority”-over-others of those who did the demolishing+taking.
The root-guru of the Christians was a guy who got physically-violent on the people running the temple as a commercial-operation…
He spoke pointedly about how the wealthy had no access to The Kingdom of G-D, Within, because their wealth was their true lord…
Nothing changes: Roman Empire, or nowadays: same values, same principles, same pseudo-“uprightness” of establishment.
Until circumstance has enforced that human-nature, ie collective-unconscious, as Jung called it, change, profoundly,
… then … still nothing will have changed.
“Bandaids” & “makeup” do not make a skeleton ( humankind’s actual-nature ) change from 1 kind to another.
It’ll be end-of-century before the ocean-of-wars we’re manufacturing has force-changed any of our racial-meaning, significantly.
Until then, this kind of class+racism’s going to remain normal.
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