By Betty Abah
I feel compelled to respond to this viral video by BBC Pidgin about the supposed first graduate from the famous Makoko fishing community in Lagos. The label accompanying the viral video of the young ebullient woman featured in the video, who just graduated from the elitist Benson Idahosa University, Edo State and is being celebrated by fellow community folks, says “Makoko in Lagos produce (sic) their first graduate.Making me cry…happy tears🥲. Education, access to it…priceless” and was forwarded to me by several persons.
Hello, that’s not true. Makoko has had graduates dating as far back as 40 years ago. She’s neither the first nor even the first female graduate. Infact, I know a woman from Makoko, now a Masters holder and currently based in Finland, who bagged her degree more than 20 years ago
These incorrect narratives, backed by powerful media platforms like the BBC and sold to the unsuspecting reading, listening or vieiwng public, need to stop already. The motive I guess is to portray impoverished communities like Makoko as a stone age entity with ragged, perhaps clothless inhabitants just crawling out of craggy cave bottoms and helped by the benevolence of development saviour figures. While on a panel during an event at the University of Lagos a couple of months back, I had a hard time countering a lecturer who accused NGOs of using Makoko as a base for poverty tourism and selfish pecuniary motives. While that is not entirely true and Makoko, especially its women and children, has received unquantifiable support from nonprofits and good-spirited individuals in the face of government’s crass failure for decades “, I think however that false narratives such as this tend to embolden such slanted and malicious accusations.
Verily, helping a youngster like this gain the very empowering education is an excellent effort. Lying on top of that gesture to gain traffic, contrived goodwill and all is not noble, sorry. I expected the very impactful Slum to School NGO which obviously supported the interviewee, Miss Mary John’s educational dream, to have corrected the BBC’s video immediately before it became a viral lie.
Miss John, featured in this fast and fanciful BBC pidgin interview, didn’t even claim to be the first from Makoko to have seen the four glittering walls of a university, she says “In my community, it is very hard to see a graduate’. Then the BBC, and who knows, Slum to School NGO as well, decided to add salt, pepper and maggi to say she is Makoko’s first. Haba mana.
Ms John was one of our girls club members in the earliest days of CEE-HOPE back in late 2013 and early 2014 in the community and has always been a smart and enthusiastic fast learner. Girls and indeed children like her need all the support they can get especially educationally to wriggle free of the clutches of poverty and other socioeconomic barriers. Lagos has more than 100 informal settlements like Makoko (which is why it is tagged ‘The mega city of slums’) and living conditions there are extremely bad, to put it mildly. The hordes of NGOs helping out in the face of the state government’s failure to improve these conditions and indeed its perennial hostilities towards the communities in the forms of its routine and outrightly lawless forced eviction policy), which brutally displaces thousands of people including infants and school children annually), could continue doing good without painting exaggerated and filtered pictures.
Our narratives must be truthful and we must do genuinely right by our vulnerable communities.
Thank you.
— Betty Abah
