Tejuosho “ghost” market: KAI officers allegedly extort money from petty traders

If you have a family member who has a shop inside the ultra modern Tejuosho Market and isn’t complaining about low sales, please give us a call.

“It’s a ghost market, it’s almost empty, almost silent like a graveyard,” a shop owner who doesn’t want to be named for fear of persecution told NewsroomNG on Monday evening.

The shop owner continue:

I don’t even feel safe in here. See my line, how many other shop owners can you see here? That’s after paying huge to get this place.

Nobody comes here, they say they think it’s some kind of big company that only people wearing suits can enter. Can you imagine that? They don’t even know that it’s a market.

In order to beat sales “drought,” Tejuosho shop owners take their goods from their shops to the streets around the huge structure, NewsroomNG gathered.

There they compete with petty traders who say they may never be able to afford any space inside the market.

These petty traders alleged government officials use the situation to rob them of the little they make.

“The Lagos State government banned us from selling goods here since late 2015,” an elderly woman whose collection of petty goods is not worth half the N18,000 national minimum wage said.

“Since then, KAI (Kick Against Indiscipline) officers come here to harass us and confiscate our goods. They don’t allow us display our products on the streets on mornings. But any time from 5:00 p.m., they allow us do our thing. For this, they charge us N200 per day.

“Before you came here today (Monday), they were here and they seized a grinding machine from one of us here. They collected N200 from the rest of us. They don’t give us receipts for this money. Some of us don’t even make up to N200 in a day.

“I had to borrow the money from another trader to stop KAI from taking my goods away,” she said..