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Paper short abstract:

The influx of migrants on Lagos coastline exacerbate the competition for scarce resources and causes conflict among the indigenous settlers, migrants, and governments on land rights ownership which led to displacement of migrants.

Paper long abstract:

As growth continued at an unprecedented rate, the influx of migrants on Lagos coastline underwent considerable change due to urban expansion. The study examined Tarkwabay, a peninsula in Lagos. It has attracted many migrants both international and local from different cultural backgrounds for different trade activities for several decades. In the year 2020, government displaced the residents and indigenous communities who have known the peninsula as home thereby leading to conflicts of ownership and land resources contestation. The key question this study set to explore is the conflict between customary and statutory land rights and the actions of government on community displacement which led to several narratives of hardship even as the COVID-19 impacts became more worrisome at the time. The study adopted open-ended interview model, life history narratives and focus group discussion with communities and government representatives on the peninsula to get qualitative data. With the use of content analysis and Nvivo software, the interviews were coded and analyzed, resulting in visualization networks that provide a narrative of themes associated with various dimensions of displacements, effects on migrants, and tackling strategies. In this article, we called for a new urban model that harnesses conflict and injustice mitigation on land, and clear community-oriented policies to encourage access to land rights and peaceful coexistence among communities in the Tarkwabay Pennisula.

Keywords: Displacement, Land Appropriation, Land rights, Migration, Lagos, Nigeria