Last year there was a story in my area of Lagos about the local market being moved to a new building. I'm a final-year economics student, and my family has had a small fabric stall in that market for more than twenty years, so it affected us directly.
I first heard about it through a neighbourhood group on a messaging app, where someone posted a photo of a notice from the local government. A few days later it was in the local newspaper and on a radio phone-in show. The plan was to close the old open-air market, which is crowded and floods badly in the rainy season, and move all the traders into a modern multi-storey building about two kilometres away.
The reaction was really divided. Some traders, especially younger ones, were happy, because the new building would have proper roofs, toilets and electricity. But many older traders, including my mother, were furious. They worried that customers wouldn't follow them, that the rent would be higher and that they'd lose their spots, which they'd held for decades. There were meetings in the evenings and even a small protest outside the council office.
The story interested me for two reasons. Personally, our family income depended on it, so I was following every update. But it also connected with what I study. It was a real example of the conflict between modernising a city and protecting people's livelihoods. In the end, a compromise was reached: traders got a year of reduced rent in the new building. My mother is still sceptical, but business has actually been fairly steady, and I ended up writing my dissertation about it.