In recent weeks, reports of arrests and imprisonment of poor and homeless people in Lagos State, alongside the brutal assault of homeless children in Cross River State, have surfaced yet again. The justification is familiar: they are a nuisance, they constitute a threat to public order, they disturb the peace. But we must pause and ask a simple, piercing question—whose peace?

There is something profoundly unsettling about a nation that begins to fear the visible evidence of its own failure. Because what is being criminalised in Nigeria today is not nuisance, it is poverty, displacement, abandonment and perhaps most disturbingly, it is the audacity of the poor to exist in public view and in spaces they are reserved for the rich.

This incessant hunting of the poor and homeless has continued unabated despite the President’s famous speech, “Let the poor breathe, don’t suffocate them” during his inauguration in 2023.

Across parts of Nigeria, the machinery of the state is increasingly deployed not to protect the vulnerable, but to remove them from sight. Street sweeps, arbitrary arrests, detention of homeless persons—these actions are often framed as urban management or security measures. But beneath that language lies a dangerous shift: the reframing of poverty as deviance.

To be poor and homeless in Nigeria today is to risk being labelled a threat and a criminal. Children without shelter are not treated as individuals in need of care and protection, but as irritants to be cleared away. The irony is both painful and stark. The state, which has failed to provide even the most basic safety nets, now punishes those who have fallen through the cracks it created. This is not governance. It is abdication masquerading as order.

Read the full article on Let The Poor Breathe!