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When “renewal” erased lives.
Development or Displacement? Human Rights and Urban Governance
The city as stage—and hiding place. In Rivers State, concrete was not just policy; it was performance. Flyovers, arterials, ribbon-lines of streetlights—each project offered the illusion of inevitability: here is progress, it says; ask no further questions. But urban development is never neutral. It distributes dignity and dispossession, often in the same breath. In cities where oversight is thin and executive will is strong, “renewal” becomes the most respectable way to move poor people out of the way (UN-Habitat, 2022, 2023). It is governance by spectacle—highly visible on opening day, invisible in its aftermath.
This part follows the lives left in that aftermath: the riverside traders whose stalls vanished at dawn, the tenants priced out by “improvements,” and the families told their homes were “illegal structures,” as though legality were a synonym for humanity. Across the Global South, these stories are common; in Rivers, they became a governing method—development that photographed well and displaced quietly (World Resources Institute [WRI], 2022; Beard, Mahendra, & Westphal, 2019).
When visibility substitutes for transparency
Cities reward leaders who build “things you can see.” But visibility often displaces accountability. The urban governance literature is unequivocal: large, capital-heavy projects tend to crowd out deliberation, weaken social safeguards, and privilege formal property over lived settlement, unless guardrails are enforced upfront (UN-Habitat, 2022; World Bank, 2018). In Nigeria’s oil-rich south, where waterfronts and informal markets sit on valuable ground, the temptation is obvious. Bulldozers arrive first; social protection arrives—if at all—after the dust (International Institute for Environment and Development [IIED], 2024).
International standards exist precisely to stop this: the World Bank’s Environmental and Social Standard 5 (ESS5) requires governments to avoid forced evictions, minimise displacement, and provide compensation and livelihood restoration before a project proceeds (World Bank, 2018, 2025). Human rights law is even plainer: forced evictions are presumptively unlawful when carried out without due process, adequate notice, consultation, and provision of alternative housing or compensation (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], n.d., 2024). In practice, the safeguards are only as strong as the politics that back them. Where executive calendars outrun planning, the first casualty is consent.
The cartography of the expendable
To understand who loses, you have to see who counts. Informal settlements house a significant share of Africa’s urban growth. New spatial estimates suggest the global footprint of such communities is far larger—and more spatially complex—than governments admit, making them easy to erase on paper and easy to target on the ground (Boanada-Fuchs, Muggah, & Fuchs, 2024). In Nigeria, slum communities are not anomalies; they are urban infrastructure for the poor—places that convert proximity to work into survival (UN-Habitat, 2023; Slum Dwellers International [SDI], 2022).
Yet policy routinely treats them as obstacles. “Beautification” and “decongestion” become development euphemisms for removal. The result is a grim arithmetic: public space widens; private futures shrink. Roberts and Lawanson (2023) describe this clearly in Nigerian cities—IDPs and low-income residents are pushed into greater precarity when demolition proceeds without resettlement planning or service provision. It is not just a housing story; it is a livelihoods story.
Displacement that does not make the news
The humanitarian system tallies disaster. It is less adept at counting the “everyday emergencies” of urban removal. Still, the evidence is there. Nigeria’s internal displacement has surged across conflict-affected regions, but displacement also tracks development pressure in fast-growing cities—where families relocate in waves too small and legalistic to attract cameras (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre [IDMC], 2024; International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2024a, 2024b). EGRISS—the expert group crafting official statistics standards—warns that when national and city systems fail to register urban displacement rigorously, the invisibility becomes policy: what is not counted is not planned for (Expert Group on Refugee, IDP and Statelessness Statistics [EGRISS], 2024).
UN OCHA’s Nigeria assessments capture the scale of vulnerability: tens of millions nationally in humanitarian need, with pockets of urban fragility where service systems cannot absorb shocks—because budgets prioritised concrete over care (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], 2024a, 2024b, 2025). The World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update reaches a similar conclusion: fiscal choices—not fate—explain why basic services lag amid growth (World Bank, 2024). If you want to see a government’s priorities, read the line items not in the speech but in the ledger.
“Illegal structures” and the law that looks away
Officials often defend demolitions by invoking legality: settlements violated planning codes; traders encroached; “reclamation” was necessary. But law has two faces. The right to adequate housing prohibits arbitrary interference with home; it obliges authorities to offer meaningful consultation, notice, and compensation before evictions, with special protection for women and children (OHCHR, n.d., 2024). ESS5 operationalises the same: avoid physical and economic displacement where possible; where unavoidable, design and fund resettlement and livelihood restoration before bulldozers move (World Bank, 2018, 2025).
When governments skip these steps, it is not “decisiveness.” It is a breach with consequences measured in malnutrition, school drop-outs, and lost earnings. OCHA’s plans quantify the downstream: food insecurity and protection risks spike when households are uprooted without a safety net (OCHA, 2024a, 2024b, 2025). WHO’s regional data show health expenditure remains too low to absorb these shocks; the “Atlas” documents how already-thin per-capita outlays translate into fragile urban primary care (World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa [WHO AFRO], 2023). The health ministry cannot catch families the bulldozer pushed over a budgetary cliff.
The Port Harcourt paradox: visible progress, invisible costs
Port Harcourt’s brand of urbanism under executive tutelage fits a continental pattern UN-Habitat has warned about: high-visibility capital investment coupled with low-transparency governance (UN-Habitat, 2022, 2023). Streets look safer; arteries flow faster; camera angles improve. But the household economy tells a different story. Nigeria’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) revealed that 63% of people—roughly 133 million—are multidimensionally poor, with urban deprivations more concentrated than is commonly assumed (National Bureau of Statistics [NBS], 2022). In cities, displacement compounds deprivation: rent spikes, transport costs rise, informal social protection networks are severed.
WHO’s Nigeria country profile makes the real trade-off stark: health systems remain under-funded relative to need; maternal mortality and preventable diseases persist at unacceptable levels (World Health Organization [WHO], 2024; WHO, 2025). When a government funds demolition without funding resettlement and service expansion, it is not re-ordering the city; it is exporting risk—from the central business district to the periphery, from the governor’s ledger to the mother’s body.
What a lawful, ethical “renewal” would look like
The path is not a mystery. The tools are on the shelf.
First, codify consent and compensation. Adopt ESS5 in letter and spirit across state projects—no eviction without prior socio-economic baseline surveys, participatory planning, site-ready resettlement, and costed livelihood restoration. Publish Resettlement Action Plans (RAPs) before—not after—removals, with grievance redress that has teeth (World Bank, 2018, 2025).
Second, make the invisible count. Implement EGRISS-aligned data systems so that urban displacement and tenure status are measured the same way everywhere, and planning cannot quietly ignore the people most affected (EGRISS, 2024). Pair this with SDI’s “Know Your City” datasets to ground official maps in community-collected reality (SDI, 2022).
Read also: Wike And The Making Of A Captured State—Part 5
Third, plan for people, not just parcels. The Global Shelter Cluster’s settlements approach threads infrastructure with livelihoods and social services; it urges authorities to treat neighbourhoods as interconnected systems, not clusters of removable structures (Global Shelter Cluster, 2020, 2024). WRI’s city agenda is complementary: prioritise access—affordable transport, serviced land, and incremental housing—over one-off monuments (WRI, 2022; Beard et al., 2019).
Fourth, publish the ledger and fix the ratio. Urban capital budgets must be accompanied by explicit allocations for resettlement, rental vouchers, and livelihood support—items that usually die between the press conference and procurement. OCHA’s humanitarian plans and the World Bank’s Nigeria diagnostics show how to cost such supports; WHO-AFRO’s expenditure atlas shows why failing to do so is deadly (OCHA, 2024a, 2024b, 2025; World Bank, 2024; WHO AFRO, 2023).
Fifth, let independent eyes in. Require third-party monitoring of every demolition or relocation, with public reporting to ensure no household disappears from the record between announcement and eviction. IEG’s performance reviews are blunt: results improve when independent verification is built in, not bolted on (Independent Evaluation Group [IEG], 2022).
The ethics of pace
Executives defend speed as virtue. But in equitable cities, pace follows process; it does not replace it. UN-Habitat’s country brief on Nigeria is explicit: sustainable urbanisation rests on inclusive planning, upgraded informal settlements, and partnerships with communities—because exclusion is not a congestion problem; it is a governance problem (UN-Habitat, 2023). The OHCHR’s guidance is even starker: when governments treat poor households as “encroachers,” dignity is the first casualty (OHCHR, 2024). Development becomes a performance for those who already have an address.
The double ledger of power
In Rivers State, “development” functioned as insulation. Each new project absorbed political oxygen and camouflaged the absence of resettlement frameworks, grievance systems, and transparent costing. Meanwhile, the national numbers moved in the wrong direction: Nigeria’s HDI indicators stagnated, humanitarian caseloads grew, and health outcomes stubbornly underperformed (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2024; OCHA, 2024a, 2024b, 2025; WHO, 2024). The double ledger is the scandal: capital budgets swelled in public; social liabilities ballooned offstage.
There is a name for this: coercive development. Not because excavators are weapons, but because choice is removed from those who must live with the consequences. When governance measures success by kilometers paved but never by households stabilised, the poor learn the real perimeter of citizenship: it ends where the new fence begins.
Closing: What the roads don’t show
The roads will last. Cameras will return for anniversaries. But the measure of a city is not how quickly it clears a right-of-way; it is how carefully it carries those whose lives lie on it. If Rivers State wants to build a capital that is more than a backdrop, it must change the unit of account—from structures delivered to people not destroyed in the delivering.
Development is not what you can point at during a convoy. Development is who can sleep after it leaves.
Professor MarkAnthony Ujunwa Nze is an internationally acclaimed investigative journalist, public intellectual, and global governance analyst whose work shapes contemporary thinking at the intersection of health and social care management, media, law, and policy. Renowned for his incisive commentary and structural insight, he brings rigorous scholarship to questions of justice, power, and institutional integrity.
Based in New York, he serves as a full tenured professor and Academic Director at the New York Center for Advanced Research (NYCAR), where he leads high-impact research in governance innovation, strategic leadership, and geopolitical risk. He also oversees NYCAR’s free Health & Social Care professional certification programs, accessible worldwide at:
https://www.newyorkresearch.org/professional-certification/
Professor Nze remains a defining voice in advancing ethical leadership and democratic accountability across global systems.
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