Lagos street traders groan over ban

Every morning, Mama Biliki prepares small bags of popcorn outside her ramshackle house in Ajegunle, one of Lagos’ poorest neighbourhoods, to sell by the roadside for 50 naira each.

On a good day, she reckons she can earn about 5,000 naira ($16, 15 euros) hawking them to pedestrians and motorists stuck in the traffic jams that plague Nigeria’s biggest city.

But the governor of Lagos state, Akinwunmi Ambode, is getting tough on street selling, leaving Mama Biliki and others like her with an uncertain future.

“I appeal to the government to allow us to hawk on the streets since we don’t have money to rent a shop, so we can continue to feed our families,” she told AFP.

“Even those with a shop, they don’t sell as much as me who hawks in the streets. There are so many taxes on shops that it doesn’t allow them to make a profit.”