A fire incident happened at the old Karu market of the Federal Capital Territory and the senator representing the FCT, Ireti Kingibe, arrived at the site at the earliest time possible. There, she spoke to sellers who lost their wares, asking them to let her know what they wanted, promising that as their representative, she would take their concerns to the relevant authorities for appropriate action. It’s the right manner to talk to people who have suffered such losses at this time when the economic situation is what it is. I don’t know yet the entire set of assistance the affected sellers will tell Kingibe to ask from government agencies on their behalf. However, I imagine they must be most concerned about financial assistance. But I think the matter goes beyond just financial assistance, as such there’s much more I expect Kingibe to focus on as she fulfils her promise.
Now, hardly did the fire incident happen than the FCT Emergency Management Department issued a statement. According to its Director-General, the firemen arrived at the scene on time but they were unable to gain access to the market. It was said that this was an illegal market, a settlement behind a new market under construction was the one engulfed by fire. It’s worth noting that this is not the first of such fire incident where the issue of access road to the site of the fire outbreak has been raised. In the Lagos Island market in Lagos State, the same excuse was given on the last three occasions that fire incidents happened. We know many market environments are ever clustered, and illegal structures are mainly to blame. Yet government agencies that should see to this don’t pay attention until there are incidents such as what has happened at the old Karu Market.
Within markets, the effective administration by the market management is often zero. The so-called market management watches as shop owners cluster the paths meant for vehicles and buyers with their goods. Sellers without shops are sometimes more than those that have shops, and they tend to occupy open spaces meant for vehicles and pedestrians. Quarrels often arise between sellers who block ways and buyers who need to walk past to conduct their businesses. Yet the market management regularly collects fees from those who illegally occupy open spaces, sometimes all the way to the edge of the main roads where vehicular movement is slowed down as a result. It’s not as if there’s an accident that causes a traffic jam but it happens because vehicles are forced to park on the road to offload passengers and goods since sellers have taken up spaces meant for vehicular activities.
Still on market management, they deploy some poorly dressed unidentifiable fellows to collect rates – both official and unofficial – without certifiable receipts. Rates paid each month may be up to three or five in one market. The failure to pay up attracts forceful closure of shops or seizure of wares from owners. I once saw a woman shouting, “What am I selling that I have to pay so much money each month?”, as some fellows without any official uniform struggled with her to seize her grinding machine. She grinds pepper in the market but she pays N3,500, N2000, and N1,500 each month as rates. That’s different from the annual payment for the shop. An observer who looks around the market sees ragtag shops made with rusted roofing sheets and sitting in a muddy dirty setting. There’s no proper planning. Hygiene is nil. The ground is slippery during the rainy season and chaos is in every direction. Vehicles don’t have access to deliver goods to shops as sellers have blocked every single space. Any fire outbreak will consume everything in sight for hundreds of metres. These are mostly the markets, what is called a market that’s prevalent across states in Nigeria.
I’ve often wondered how we have such a situation in a country where there are government agencies meant to ensure that markets are of certain standards. So, where are the officials in the local government councils paid to maintain standards regarding different aspects of market activity? Within a market, what does the market management do? What do they do with the various rates they collect? Who are they responsible to in LG councils that oversee markets? What have concerned agencies been doing to ensure markets operate according to specified standards? This is more as ours is a developing nation. What development plans do we have regarding markets as towns and cities develop? Are we going to continue with the traditional, largely unplanned open spaces where selling points simply spring up with no one to ask questions?
This shouldn’t be happening in this century, and certainly not in urban areas such as Lagos and Abuja. There are many such largely unplanned markets that lack supervision in other urban centres. It’s an irony that it’s in urban areas that fire incidents have proved to be more devastating, wreaking unmitigated havoc on helpless citizen’s life investments. Cities are where there should be adequate facilities to combat fire. But the lack of access to sites of fire outbreaks for firemen has become a regular excuse. The latest excuse was given in the FCT of the nation.
Whenever there’s a fire incident, government officials promise government intervention, sometimes in the form of financial assistance. But this can’t be the end of the matter in a nation where markets appear to be the least of our developmental focus. When they are and state governments construct stalls they are so expensive that the average seller can’t afford them. In the event, people look for open spaces where they develop illegal markets with all the eventual negative consequences. Sometimes, market stalls constructed by the governments end up in the hands of middlemen who resell at higher prices that many of our people can’t afford. How does this happen in a situation where facilitating the conduct of private business by citizens should be the focus of the government? People trade to earn a living and pay taxes and rates to governments, so spaces for trading should be something the governments should provide and make affordable to whoever wants them.
The government benefits much at the end of the day. How? Planned market spaces make it easier for people in the informal sector to be accessible to government agents. Agents can easily gather useful data needed for planning, and collecting rates, and then bring citizens in this sector into the tax net. Instead, the manner markets are treated makes many in the informal sector unreachable. The more people are forced to leave planned settings for unplanned ones, the less the government is able to reach them and make them fulfil their civic responsibilities. In any unplanned market setting corruption festers as market management collects rates from which no revenue gets to the government. Percentages from market rates that should go to local government council authorities are lost as revenue. As already stated, by failing to provide standard market spaces that are affordable, the governments push helpless Nigerians into unplanned spaces. Then when fire incidents happen in such spaces, the governments that don’t collect every collectible revenue release funds to support. This cycle should stop because it leads a nation and its economy nowhere.
When Kingibe was asking sellers involved in the fire incident at the Karu market to let her know what they wanted, it occurred to me that what the sellers wanted should go beyond assistance in the form of funds. It should include assistance in the form of planned markets and shops that are affordable for everyone involved. As such, Kingibe can make this one of the areas of her legislative activities and public action on behalf of her constituency. Public officials – lawmakers, state governors, local government chairmen – can toe the line. Our people work, they don’t beg. They don’t always look up to the government for help. So the governments should make it easy for them to do the work they know. Let our people trade in conducive settings, in planned safe markets with affordable shops in large enough numbers. I’m sure the affected sellers in the old Karu Market would like this. Citizens expecting this from the governments can’t be asking for too much, I suppose.