Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ãmos|Dec. 14,.2025
Port Harcourt has always lived with a double reputation: a city of oil-fed brilliance and urban promise, yet shadowed by visible neglect where the most fragile of its residents sleep beneath flyovers and wake to the roar of traffic. Anyone who knows the city well knows this truth without needing statistics. Bridges double as bedrooms, roundabouts as resting places, and busy corridors as improvised sanctuaries for men and women whose minds have lost their moorings. In this regard, the recent decision by Rivers State Government to clear the streets of persons suffering from mental illness is, in principle, both defensible and humane if it is rooted in care rather than concealment.
Urban psychiatry has long warned that mental illness untreated in public spaces rarely remains static. Conditions that might have been managed with early intervention often deteriorate through prolonged exposure to hunger, violence, substance abuse, and environmental stressors (Goffman, 1963; Patel et al., 2018). In Nigeria, where community mental health infrastructure remains thin and heavily stigmatized, the street becomes not merely a dwelling but an amplifier of illness (Atilola, 2015). Thus, a government that intervenes early by removing vulnerable persons from hostile environments and redirecting them to care is acting not against humanity but in its defence. Other states, notably Edo and Anambra, would do well to study and replicate such action, adapting it to local realities.
Yet cities are not healed by selective sanitation. A metropolis that removes visible madness while tolerating organised lawlessness merely rearranges its anxieties. Rivers State, having cleared one category of disorder, must confront another that is more dangerous precisely because it hides behind familiarity. The streets of Port Harcourt cry out not only from untreated illness but from unchecked intimidation.
The flyovers tell the story. Eleme Flyover, now infamous, has slipped from civic triumph into urban nightmare. What was designed as a solution to traffic congestion is slowly acquiring the character of a no-man’s-land: daylight robberies, coordinated harassment, stalking, extortion, and ritualised fear. The perpetrators are not disoriented minds abandoned by society; they are organised, conscious, calculating. Urban criminology reminds us that disorder tolerated in public spaces invites escalation, normalises violence, and erodes civic trust (Wilson & Kelling, 1982). When brigandage becomes routine, the city quietly teaches its citizens that the state has retreated.
More troubling still is the creeping comparison with Lagos. For decades, Lagos was the benchmark, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes deserved, of agbero dominance. Today, Port Harcourt appears determined to rival it. Wherever a vehicle pauses, human toll collectors emerge. Roads, parks, highways, byways, no space is exempt. The consequences are neither trivial nor abstract: inflated transport fares, heightened accident risks, general and mindless aggression, and a daily erosion of urban dignity. Transport economics shows that informal coercive levies distort pricing, punish the poor disproportionately, and entrench violent intermediaries within public infrastructure (Olvera et al., 2016).
There is a cruel irony here. The mentally ill person wandering a flyover is visible, pitiable, and largely predictable. “Agberoism” is organised, anonymous, and volatile. One is abandoned by society; the other thrives because society has looked away. One demands compassion and care; the other demands regulation and the firm hand of law. To confuse these categories, or to address one while indulging the other, is to misunderstand the anatomy of urban decay.
Cities are moral texts written in concrete. What they tolerate, they endorse; what they regulate, they civilise. Clearing the streets of persons with mental illness must never become an exercise in cosmetic governance, a way of hiding suffering from public sight. It must be paired with sustained rehabilitation, clinical care, and reintegration. Equally, clearing the streets of organised extortion and flyover brigandage is not optional, it is the unfinished sentence of governance itself.
In the final analysis, it is indeed easier to manage known mental illness than to confront cultivated lawlessness. The former appeals to conscience; the latter tests political will. Rivers State has taken a step. Whether it completes the journey will determine whether Port Harcourt becomes a city merely swept clean or one genuinely made safe.
Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ãmos is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Uromi and a Lecturer at CIWA, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
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