“It’s a regeneration of a slum,” he said. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties. Nobody was even living in those shanties. Maybe we had a couple of squatters living there.”

As for the new housing, “there’s not a chance they can afford it,” said Felix Morka, executive director of the Social and Economic Rights Action Center, a local economic rights group, adding that Badia residents earn under $100 a month on average. The World Bank had previously included Badia on a list of slum communities for upgrade, Mr. Morka noted.

That list is now moot. Within six hours, Badia East was gone.

“We don’t have anywhere to stay,” said Joy Austin, a mother of three. “Everybody is outside now. We don’t have anywhere to go.”

Her sleeping accommodation is now a filthy foam mattress placed on cardboard, in the mud; her children sleep under low torn mosquito nets.

A wig pokes out of the rubble; nearby are a few bras, a child’s toy gun, some CDs, a torn shirt, a crushed shampoo bottle, and some flip-flops. At the edge of the rubble-field, small boys played makeshift table tennis on two boards placed atop jerrycans while a young man pushed a wheelbarrow of salvaged wood with a small Nigerian flag tied to it. In the evening, boys who clambered barefoot over the upturned, nail-studded boards received painful wounds.

Mr. Morka, a Harvard-trained lawyer who is challenging the state government in court over the demolitions, said: “They want a Lagos that looks good, that feels good, that glitters. But they are well aware that Lagos is Lagos because of the people that live here. They are doing this without regard for the people who live here.”

That sentiment — that the government had, bewilderingly, declared open season on its own people — permeated the Badia residents.