NANTS Slams Lagos Demolitions, Questions Federal Government’s Unholy Silence - The National Association of Nigerian Traders NANTS

The National Association of Nigerian Traders (NANTS) expresses deep concern and outrage over the recent reckless demolition of shops and other structures carried out by the Lagos State Government at the International Trade Fair Complex in Ojo, FESTAC and other parts of Lagos State, under the guise of enforcing physical planning laws. Our office has been inundated with several petitions from traders that lost goods and property worth billions of Naira.

While NANTS supports the need for lawful and orderly urban development, we strongly and out-rightly condemn any action that disproportionately targets, humiliates, or economically cripples legitimate Nigerian traders, and surreptitiously target the destruction of the livelihoods of a particular ethnic group, who have for decades remained one of the major contributors of Lagos’s commercial vitality and Nigeria’s economic growth.

Reports reaching NANTS reveal that many traders who are victims of this barbaric culture received little or no prior notice before their properties and shops were demolished. These are hardworking Nigerians who have invested life earnings and savings into their businesses, pay taxes, and employ thousands as value addition to the nation’s GDP. To subject such a constituency to sudden loss and humiliation is both inhuman, economically senseless and a gross abuse of any deemed privilege conferred on any leader.

It is most worrying and acrimonious that the federal government of Nigeria has remained passive, feigned ignorant and slept over an entire episode of such magnitude without cautioning the Lagos State Government, even when it is clear that the International Trade Fair Complex is not a property of the Lagos State Government and neither was it developed by the State.

It is indeed a debilitating paradox that a government that has been travelling around the globe in search of foreign investors with nothing to showcase is so silent when local investments by her own people are whimsically destroyed by part of the same government.  

We are shocked that under an economy that is trying to renew hope from subsidy removal where traders are left with no visible impact, no relief mechanism, no business protection scheme, and no direct support for livelihoods; we are only seeing productive citizens left at the mercy of bulldozers and bureaucratic oppression. Nigerian traders who are the largest employers in the informal sector should not be losing their businesses overnight in the name of enforcement. This level of economic insensitivity betrays the very essence of governance.

Accordingly, therefore, NANTS demands that:

NANTS seeks to remind those in authority that leadership is a trust — and every policy is a test of conscience. Governance must not be reduced to bulldozers and excuses. These traders are not criminals; they are citizens struggling to survive, feed their families, and contribute to national growth, and must be duly respected and treated with dignity.

Nigeria cannot prosper while destroying the very hands that build her economy. The Federal and Lagos State Governments must rise above primordial political sentiments, selective and embarrassing enforcement, butembrace justice, compassion, and dialogue.

Signed:

Dr Ken UKAOHA, Esq.

National President, National Association of Nigerian Traders (NANTS)

www.nants.org