Port Harcourt
- a more equitable distribution of wealth to encourage private house building and to stimulate the internal economy; and
- an improvement in the standards of urban management.
21.17 APPENDIX: STATEMENTS BY RESIDENTS
- Mrs. A. comes from Oguta in Imo, and lives in one room at Ikwerre Road, for which she pays N300 (1994) per month. She is 36, has 5 children who live with her, aged between 9 and 17 years, and her husband has left her. Mrs Azogu's room, in which the whole family lives, measured about 9.5m². The ceiling is falling down and it contains only a double bed and mattress, a bench, a kerosene stove, a plastic bucket, a table, and cooking and eating equipment.
My husband is not here. He is unemployed in Lagos. All my children are in school. My husband has not been here for two years. He has abandoned us. I have Primary 6. I got to secondary class 3. I got pregnant in class 3 and couldn't continue. There was a time when things were good. That time he was working in Delta NEPA at Ugheli. He has since been retrenched.
I manage. I pay N75 per term for each of my two children. Last term I paid N1,800 for my third son to get admission. I am not happy. Life is not kind to me. The money I make is just not enough to feed my children and pay house rent. Five of us live in the room. My junior sister, myself and three of my children. When my two children are on holiday, we are seven. Everyday I go to the market and spend about N500 except on Sundays.
Sometimes I make a profit (on selling in the market) of N50. At other times I make N100. Sometimes I lose. The day before yesterday and Tuesday I ran at a loss but at least my children ate.
I take my children to the School of Health when they are sick. Sometimes they complain of stomach trouble and stooling and vomiting. At other times it is Malaria.
- Mr. B. E., from Akwete in Imo State, is 52, married, with 6 children, and lives mainly by running a small club that he has built on stilts over a piece of degraded and thoroughly polluted mangrove swamp overlooking the tank farm and surrounded by toilets. He was doing comparatively well because he manages to send his eldest child to school in Aba which costs him about N15,000 per year.
- His house is good by Bundu standards, having a bit of land around it. It has 2 rooms: one (9m² with a front veranda about 1m deep) is part of a line of similar rooms which have concrete foundations and floors and timber frames with an external skin of corrugated galvanised sheets and an inner skin of plywood including ceiling; a second room is similar in plan but entirely constructed of wood, and is placed opposite the first so that there is a covered space, 2m wide, between the two rooms; at the rear of the second building is a simple lean-to store (6m²). The general condition of the buildings, like most in the waterside is very poor and is particularly noticeable in the roof, which is a mass of small bits of corrugated galvanised
252
