SPECIAL REPORT: We’ve Been Abandoned, Residents in FCT Community Without Basic Amenities Cry Out

By Gabriel Ameh, The Sight News

ABUJA: Life in Nigeria is strongly shaped by the many infrastructural challenges bedeviling the country. There are even more pressing issues for many people living in Nigeria, such as the inadequate supply of safe water,high cost of house rent and the high prices of many consumer goods which has made living difficult. 

Regardless of location, the situation appears to be the same nationwide, and the nation’s capital, Abuja is not excluded. The quest to know how people live without enjoying the basic amenities of life in some parts of Abuja drew the attention of The Sight News to Dayisan community.

Located inward from Gosa village along airport road, Lugbe Abuja, with about 1,000 inhabitants and about 3 kilometers away from the Nnamdi Azikiwe expressway, the journey to Dayisan community was a bumpy one due to the dilapidated road dotted on one side with electric poles within Kpayi village that are not linked by cables, indicating abandonment due to either insufficient funds or misappropriation. Notable were the dried stream pathways surrounded by bushes and rocks.

Dayisan is one of the long-abandoned communities with over four decades in existence that makes Nigeria’s capital, FCT a dualism, where officials take refuge in their luxurious porch houses and offices with standard infrastructure and services at the centre, leaving hundreds of thousands of others to wallow in extremely toxic circumstances in the rural peripheries. The rich may never see the poor from the neglected areas.

The abandoned communities are mostly homes of the indigenous people who originally had settled in Abuja before it became Nigeria’s national capital, decades ago.

“For the 43 years of the FCT, the government has been unfair to the original people ”, said Mr. Gadeh Suleiman, the Ward Head of the Dayisan community. “And this is a democracy; they don’t remember us. In this community, Dayisan, in Kuje Area Council, there is only one teacher for the one primary school built by UBEB  here”.

Explaining that the original inhabitants of Abuja like him have become orphans in Nigeria’s equation, Gadeh noted that the Nigerian constitution provides that the President and the National Assembly hold the executive and legislative responsibilities over the people of the FCT respectively.

Driving to the Dayisan community is a herculean task and this Reporter gathered that at the peak of the wet season, the people are stuck in their villages due to the rising water which makes it practically impossible for the villagers to go in search of their daily bread or attend to basic needs.

“During such a season we can’t go out. If there is heavy rain, the rain water will overflow the bridge”, said Abdulkarim Mada Suleiman, an indigene of Dayisan village and a final year student of the Federal College of Education Zuba. “We have to wait until it subsides before we can cross over to attend to our needs” 

Lack of Portable Drinking Water

The problem of portable drinking water at Dayisan Community dates back to the collapse of a hand-pump borehole system sunk by the Abuja Municipal Area Council [AMAC] five years ago, which the entire community and neighboring villages such as Kpayi and Rugan Fulani depended on, alongside the water flowing from the stream. 

For Abdulkarim Mada, an indigene, fetching water from the stream for their households became a last resort as the borehole worked for about a year before it stopped supplying water to the community. “The water is not safe for us but we have no option than to use it like that and believe in God to take care of our health”, he explained.

THE SIGHT NEWS gathered that in 2019, Senator Phillip Aduda sunk a motorized borehole for the community. The borehole, which got bad for over two weeks and was fixed a day before the visit, required a generator to pump the engine to supply water into the tank, as well as  routine maintenance. Whenever the borehole gets bad the community resorts to fetching water from the stream.

Education in Dayisan Village

Basic school-aged children, scruffy in appearance, were either scampering after one another or joining in farm work and domestic chores during school hours when this Reporter visited.

In a brief interview with the Head of the School in the community, L.E.A Dayisan, Mr. Ibrahim Zanko Abdullahi, it was gathered that the school was established January 2, 2020, with 24 students on the enrolment list, and now has a population of 78 students with only him as an employed teacher, and an assistant from the Universal Basic Education Board (UBEB) without any classroom teacher. 

However, there are four volunteer teachers who are also indigenes of Dayisan village and graduates of the FCE Zuba. With farming as their main occupation, the volunteer teachers teach the students intermittently at will, whenever they do not have to go to farm.

The lack of adequate classrooms in the one-block of three classrooms built by UBEB, made them merge classes for the students. On every school days, the school which runs primary one (1) to five (5) for now has Primary one (1) in a class alone, Primary two (2) and three (3) are merged into one class while Primary four (4) and  five (5) are merged into one class too.

The school and the children in the community are faced with numerous challenges which affect their learning abilities such as; lack of adequate teachers, lack of teaching and instructional aids; lack of infrastructural amenities such as classrooms and libraries, as well as lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene as both teachers and students practice open defecation in the community, which is dangerous to their health. 

Primary Healthcare

Despite the fact that the World Health Organisation (WHO) considers the primary healthcare system the first line of defence during pandemic outbreaks in any community, there is however no health facility in the village and they are only able to access healthcare at the Gosa Healthcare Center which is about eight (8) kilometers away from them.

This puts the lives of the villagers at risk, especially pregnant women and girls as they have to travel that far during childbirth which could lead to complications or even death.

Challenges and Diseases

A lack of focus on community health can lead to a range of complex problems that aren’t easy to correct. 

Chronic diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, can also increase if a community’s overall well-being is suffering. An unhealthy community tends to be obese and struggle more from chronic diseases and other health challenges. 

Curbing the spread of infectious disease is also a priority of community health programs, without them, communities may find themselves battling outbreaks of illnesses that put vulnerable populations like the elderly at higher risk. With the lack of attention to healthcare by the government, especially at community level, people who should be contributing to the economy of the country tend to die unnecessarily due to negligence.

The situation in the villages such as Dayisan, Kpayi and Rugan Fulani all in the Federal Capital Territory, are the reality of Nigeria’s under-development and poverty in human and infrastructure terms. These communities have children, whose bodies and minds may never develop fully due to malnourishment and lack of access to education; there is also lack of access to electricity, water, road, healthcare and security, as thousands of citizens across the villages are left to cater for themselves without basic amenities, constituting high risk to Nigeria’s economic, political, and social growth.

Poor Governance

The issue of poor governance and chronic inequality in Nigeria’s Federal Capital city is glaring, as outside of the enclaves of the rich such as Maitama, Asokoro and others, Abuja has urban slums with residents that do not all have access to electricity, public water service, thereby facing sanitation and planning crises.

Residents of Dayisan community are pleading for support from the government and their representatives in government in the areas of provision of more classrooms where the children can learn, employing more teachers, building libraries and sanitation facilities for them and extending electricity to the community, and the school in order to make the learning environment conducive. Supporting these people will go a long way as they are the people who should be growing the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This Article is exclusive to The Sight News Online and should not be used either in part or in whole without permission from the publishers. Send us an Email at thesightnews@gmail.com