Original article published by the Huffington Post.
How The World Bank Broke Its Promise To Protect The Poor
Beneath a gloomy white sky, more than 100 armed police poured into the slum of Badia East in the teeming megacity of Lagos, Nigeria. As they advanced, they cracked their batons on the unpaved streets and against the ramshackle walls of the shanties. “If you love your life, move out!” the officers shouted. Thousands of people grabbed what belongings they could carry and fled. Then a line of hulking excavators moved in, using their hydraulic claws to smash homes into pieces. Within hours, the neighborhood was a ruin.
Bimbo Omowole Osobe briefly lost track of her children in the chaos. When she returned to the community hours later, her concrete-block home and two small shops were gone.
“It’s like when a woman goes in for labor, and the baby comes out dead,” she said. “That’s how it felt to me.”
The Lagos state government flattened Badia East in February 2013 to clear land in an urban renewal zone financed by the World Bank, the global lender committed to fighting poverty. The neighborhood’s poor residents were cast out without warning or compensation and left to fend for themselves in a crowded, dangerous city.
Evictions like the one in Badia East aren’t supposed to happen in the middle of projects backed by the World Bank.
Read full article here: http://goo.gl/pVLUuy.
Netherlands for the World Bank 