ABUJA: Under the din of traffic from the highway bridge that cuts over his fields, Bala Haruna inspects corn, cassava and okra on his family farm.
A pump pulls up water from a nearby stream and is diverted through trenches dug through cropland wedged between four-lane roads — fields which were here long before the nearby hotel, the imposing national mosque or any of the high-rises that make up downtown Abuja were even dreamed up.
There were no buildings here,” Haruna, 42, told AFP, reminiscing over his childhood as birds chirped and frogs croaked.
The urban farms dotting Nigeria’s capital show the limits of the top-down management the planned city is known for – oases scattered around pockmarked downtown that has long expanded outward faster than it has filled in.
They owe much of their existence to the fact that they lie in hard-to-develop gulches along creek beds.
Even roads built through them over the years tended to be elevated highway overpasses.
That fragile balancing act, however, is increasingly under threat, as developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in a city known for concrete sprawl.
On the other side of the overpass, the future has arrived: the vegetation abruptly stops and temperatures suddenly rise over flattened fields razed by construction crews.
