Nigeria’s road projects become harder to celebrate when the people losing homes and livelihoods cannot prove they existed on government compensation lists.
Development Diaries reports that the government of Lagos State recently announced it had paid three billion naira in compensation to 331 people affected by ongoing road construction projects across the state, presenting the payment as part of its commitment to fairly compensate residents displaced by public infrastructure.
Paying compensation where government acquires land deserves recognition, but the concern is whether everyone who lost homes, shops or livelihoods was actually counted before the money was shared.
Compensation is only as fair as the list behind it, and in Lagos State that list has often struggled to recognise the people living and working outside the formal property system.
Many Lagosians build businesses from roadside kiosks, rent rooms without ownership documents or earn daily incomes from spaces that exist physically but rarely exist on official records.
When demolition begins, many of those residents simply disappear from official compensation records.
Everything now depends on who made the list. If the 331 beneficiaries exclude market women, tenants, artisans and informal traders, the people who often lose the most have once again paid for Lagos’ development without compensation.
Paying compensation is only part of the obligation; government must also show that everyone displaced had a fair chance of being counted.
The Lagos State government and its Lands Bureau oversee both the acquisition process and the compensation register, placing them at the centre of determining who is recognised as displaced and who quietly disappears from the official record.
Nigeria’s constitution requires prompt compensation whenever government compulsorily acquires property, while the Land Use Act provides the legal framework for that process.
Those protections mean little if compensation reaches only those with title documents while overlooking thousands whose livelihoods depend on land they occupy but cannot prove on paper.
The consequences fall most heavily on market women, tenants, artisans and other low-income residents, who are usually the first to lose shops, homes and customers when roads expand.
Older residents and persons with disabilities face even greater hardship because relocation is more difficult and rebuilding livelihoods takes longer.
Infrastructure should improve cities without making the poorest residents pay the highest price for that improvement. That is why transparency matters as much as compensation itself, because a list the public cannot examine is a list the public cannot confidently trust.
Displaced residents and community associations should demand publication of the beneficiary list and the criteria used to determine eligibility while documenting informal occupants omitted from the compensation process.
The Lagos State Lands Bureau should also disclose how tenants and informal occupants were assessed, establish an appeals process for excluded claimants and adopt future resettlement policies that recognise displacement beyond formal land titles.
A compensation exercise should not leave the people who lost everything searching for proof that government ever counted them.
