Drawn On Paper - by Faye🥀

Maraba Nyanya! Maraba Nyanya! Seven…seven hundred! The voice of the touts tear through the air at the park. It’s urgent, loud and almost musical. People surge forward. Pushing. Pressing. Shouting. Madam, you de go nau. Inside a dented white bus with broken seats and a missing side mirror, a woman balances a bag of garri on her lap with her baby tied behind her back. She’s on her way home from work. A man’s elbow digs into her ribs. No one complains. This is how you enter Abuja if you are not part of the plan. By the next day, Mama Isa will be on her knees. Scrubbing toilets in Maitama. Polishing floors in Asokoro. Faced with condescending looks in neighborhoods where her own son Isa may never walk freely, let alone live in. She will clean the office. She will scrub the toilet. And when a child from the estate runs past her mop, squealing, she will smile and wonder if her own Isa will ever walk these streets without being asked, “what are you doing here?!” No state in Nigeria reflects the realities of classism more starkly than Abuja. And the divide is only widening. In Lagos, the rich and poor share the same traffic jam. In Abuja, they don’t breathe the same air. The senator’s daughter has a dedicated transformer. Mama Isa’s street has not seen NEPA in three years. The senator’s estate has its own police post. But when Mama Isa’s neighbor was robbed, the police came after three hours and asked for transport fare before writing a report. The senator’s daughter attends a school where children learn coding. Isa will attend a school where children learn to dodge falling ceiling boards. The senator built a gate to keep “strangers” out. That word strangers means people like Mama Isa. People that clean his toilet. People that wash his daughter’s uniform. People that were not part of the master plan. In Abuja, the poor are not just poor. They are invisible. The plan did not forget them. The plan drew a line. One side has light. The other learns to memorize the dark. Some may say this is just how cities are. That inequality happens everywhere. That Lagos is worse, Kano is older, Port Harcourt louder. But Abuja is different. Abuja was drawn on paper before it was built. The people who made the map decided where the light would go. They decided who would live inside the plan and who would be pushed to the edge. The streetlights that stop at the city border are not a mistake. The rich have always been part of the plan while the poor are the footnotes. The gap is not growing by chance. It is growing because someone drew it that way.

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