(ERGO) – Mumin Ali Muse has been struggling to buy food, raise school fees for his children, and pay rent after he and his family were crudely evicted from their home in Nahwo IDP camp in Mogadishu’s Deynile district.
The small shop from which he earned a living for the family selling daily items to others in the camp was also destroyed, when – without any notice – the new owners had everyone forcefully evicted from the land they had just bought for private development.
Mumin has moved his family to another camp in Siinka-dher area. Since the eviction last December, they have had to cut down on the three meals they were used to and managing to get just one meal a day thanks to other IDP neighbours.
Having had reasonable amenities in Nahwo, they have nothing in this new area. He and his wife and 12 children are squeezed into a small two-room shack.
“We go to borehole owners to give us water because there is a water shortage. This is a new place and people are just moving here. There are no toilets. I still have the iron-sheets we salvaged from our previous camp although I don’t have the money to reconstruct anything with them,” Mumin said.
Six of his children were getting free education in Nahwo camp in grades two, three and four. Now they have no school they can attend.
“My children were in school, but not anymore. I was selling at my shop; it is also no more. The camp was destroyed, we don’t have anything now,” he complained.
In fact, it is the second time this family has faced such an eviction ordeal as Mogadishu spreads into the outskirts where most IDP camps are located.
“As the city expands and comes closer to the camps, we have been forced to relocate. To reconstruct my shop, I would need about $100 and I don’t have anything, so we are just sitting around,” Mumin said.
Finding work in an undeveloped area like Siinka-dher, seven kilometres from Nahwo, is also difficult, and many families forced there have had to leave the jobs that were sustaining their families with reasonable income.
Nuuro Baarow Nuune, a single mother of six, had been making a steady living for her family for six years in Nahwo through her cleaning services. Now, unable to get to and from her normal work places in Deynile, they are facing lack of food.
“We had a small house and it was good. I had a stable income for my family. Now we have just covered ourselves in plastic bags. I don’t have money to construct another house,” Nuuro said.
Nuuro told Radio Ergo’s local correspondent that she visits Abdiaziz and Kaaran districts hoping to find cleaning jobs, walking for two hours to Ex-control bus stage then taking public transport to Hamarweyne. If she gets work she has to spend half of the pay on transport.
“We are far from the tarmac road, so I was forced to walk early in the morning and find a living for my children. In my previous camp, there were people that we knew, I had some people I was regularly working for, but now the jobs are in far places,” said Nuuro.
Her family came to the camps in Mogadishu after their property was destroyed by floods in 2018 in a rural area of Jowhar, Middle Shabelle, where she owned a shop. Her husband died of diabetes in 2021, leaving her to raise the children alone.
Mohamud Ali, a camp leader for Nahwo, Said-2, Tawakal, and Al-Wasac camps, told Radio Ergo that since October 2023 nearly 1,000 IDP families had been evicted from camps in Deynile, Kahda and Garasbaley districts.
Some of these families had been settled for several years in these camps and had established small businesses and put their children into school.
Mohamud said developers were constructing new houses on the camp lands to accommodate the city’s population growth and expansion.
However, without even being afforded a decent notice period, the IDPs being evicted were thrown back into poverty as they tried to rebuild their lives again from scratch.
“The biggest problem is that when the IDP families arrive in an open area, they start living there and services like water, electricity and roads come up, and so the land starts gaining value. Then the property agents come up and therefore the IDPs get evicted when the land is bought,” the camp leader explained.
