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CHILD-FRIENDLY REPORTING The Dreams the Bulldozers Killed Betty Abah, Tell magazine, August 27, 2007 On the day Joshua and Jeremiah, the Yemoh twins, decided to make an appearance on earth, the bulldozers from the Federal Capital Development Authority, FCDA, Abuja, were mowing down the house in which they were to live. Nine months later, the entire event of that day, October 6, 2006, still plays through the mind of Joseph Yemoh, their father, like a gripping scene from Nollywood the day Aleita, on the outskirts of Abuja, fell. “After my wife was delivered of the two boys in the early hours of the day at Apo Clinic, Abuja,” he recalled, “I went home to get food and as I was stepping back into the hospital, around 8 am, my neighbours called to say I should come, that bulldozers were at work on my house,” he said. On getting home, around 9 am, the bulldozers were already at the threshold of Yemoh's house, about bringing down his five-bedroom apartment property, warts and all. “I tried to explain to them that my wife had just been delivered of twins, but they wouldn't listen. They asked me to give them N10,000 so that they could give me time to retrieve my things inside. We eventually settled for N4,000, and I was able to pick my things,” he said. A church member later vacated her apartment for the new baby boys, their three-year-old elder brother, Manasseh, and their parents to find their rhythm for the next six months. But if the Yemoh twins are too innocent to bemoan the circumstances of their birth, and their (still economically dislocated) parents have hinged their hope on a glorious future, the Dagiyang family in Mararaba, a squalid settlement in Nasarawa State, appears too gripped in the claws of hunger and deprivation to get into futuristic moods. Every day, Felicia Dagiyang, 45, mother of the seven Dagiyang children and wife of Matthew Dagiyang, 54, watches as other children hurry to school and all her children, aged between two and 18 years, saunter around the house awaiting the next meal. She would retire into the privacy of the uncompleted building that is now home, and weep. “I always wonder what would become of them in future, with the present condition of things,” she told TELL recently, backing the house's windows whose gaping nakedness is covered only by rags and cartons. But the priority these days, she said, is food. But in the scale of tragedies, the Okwukwus, next door, suffer a worse fate. “I want to go to school and learn more things so that I can become an actor like Jim Iyke,” said Chukwuma, 10, sixth child of the Okwukwus and a former primary four pupil of Divine Mercy Nursery and Primary School, Utako, where he and two other siblings Rita, eight, and Raphael, six used to attend. That dream may never be realised, not only because his school was levelled, but because his father lost three of his hotels (Hotel Limousine, Lambo Guest Inn, and Kings Royal Hotel), five of his buildings and other properties, all in Utako, to the demolition squad last July. They now live in an uncompleted building at Mararaba. Worse still, his father, Israel, now lies between life and death at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. The ailment, according to his daughter, Ruth, 19, is “malaria and hypertension”. Where Chukwuma now stays with his mother and seven siblings is simply a tear-jerking mockery of human habitation: what was meant to be a four-bedroom flat is now more of a shabby pen, if not a gallery of antiquated goods. The house is yet to be electrified. Almost everyone is out of school, but most painful to them is the case of Richard, their 21-year-old brother who had to discontinue his final year Senior Secondary School Certificate Examinations at Kings College, on the outskirts of the FCT, as there was no money for exam fees and daily transport to the school which is sited several miles away from their current abode. Most of their properties, it was learnt, have been sold and their mother, Rose, has no job. The above are only a few of thousands of victims of forced evictions which took place around the FCT in 2006 alone. The method of Eviction (in both cases of those who