By Opeyemi Festus
Felix Oguejiofor Abugu, former Editor of The Guardian on Saturday, whose N70 million Lagos home was demolished recently by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAA), is leading a group of other victims to the National Assembly to protest the inhuman act.
The group under the aegis of Association of Victims of Runview/Mercy Estate Lagos Demolitions, petitioned NASS over the incident, which occurred on Friday, April 28, 2023, when bulldozers sent by agents of FAAN, brought down their homes, with many of them not allowed to pick out even a broom.
In protesting “the wrongful destruction of our houses by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and its agents,” the victims, in a petition signed by Abugu and countersigned by five others of the 13 victims of the controversial exercise, asking the members of the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation to intervene, the group insisted the action was wrongly done by FAAN (which owns Runview/Mercy Estate).
They described the treatment as “unfair, even lacking in common sense,” especially with the fact that the same FAAN, which, ab initio, gave them approval to build on their plots would later turn around, after the empty lands had been developed, to claim that “we built on unauthorised area.”
Outside Abugu, the group’s spokesman, others who signed the document, dated May 4, 2023, included Olufemi George Adewunmi, Francis Okechukwu Eke, Mr. George and Mrs. Victoria Egwakhe and two others, the petition recalled that “on Friday, April 28, 2023, bulldozers hired by FAAN from Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA) rolled into our Estate and demolished 13 buildings.”
The statement, said: “Out of this number, we protest that six of the buildings belonging to our members were wrongfully demolished,” the petitioners asserted, adding that “had FAAN or any of its agents given us audience prior to the demolitions, they would have discovered that there was no cogent reason for their action (because) we have evidence to prove that the plots on which we built were legitimately acquired under an arrangement put in place by FAAN itself.
“In 2015/2016, long before most of us started developing our property, FAAN undertook an enumeration of all the plots of land in what was originally Richfield Estate (named after a school called Richfield Schools, the first development on that piece of real estate), later renamed Runview/Mercy State by the Airports Authority.
“Termed ‘Regularization’, the idea of the enumeration was to streamline all titles to plots of land in the Estate at the payment of N2m (two million naira only) per plot to the Landlords Association acting in behalf of FAAN.
“Sir, there is available evidence that more than half of the six landlords whose houses were destroyed had paid more than half of the 2m ‘Regularisation’ fee (some N1m, some N1.2m, some 1.5m, among others) demanded by FAAN, long before they even started building their houses.
“What that means is that FAAN had way back recognised us as bonafide owners of property in the Runview/Mercy Estate. The question is, if our members had complied with the Airports Authority’s demands ab initio, why did FAAN then turn around to demolish our houses without any cogent reasons?
“As we read in the press, LASBCA, which merely deployed its equipment and personnel to carry out the demolitions for FAAN, said our buildings were destroyed because they were built on an oil pipeline. However, to the best of our knowledge, Sir, none of our members built their house on any oil pipeline as no such a thing exists in our section of the Estate.
“As a matter of fact, FAAN itself, aided by the Landlords’ Association, had in April last year carried out an excavation on one of members’ property to find out if there was any pipeline running underground through that stretch of land covering six buildings on IK Peter’s Close, but did not find any. Indeed, it is on record that FAAN/Landlords Association offered to pay for the cost of that excavation but one of our members eventually picked the bill.
“So, how could our buildings have been demolished on the grounds that they were built on a non-existent oil pipeline? Is this a case of giving a dog a bad name in order to kill it? Obviously!”
The group, which presented a copy of the petition to the Chairman of the House Committee on Aviation, Hon. Nnolim Nnaji, who led members of his Committee on a fact-finding tour of the demolition site over the weekend, consequently appealed that in the light of the ‘obvious miscarriage of justice’ in the “wrongful demolition of our members’ houses, we plead with you, Sir, and members of your committee to use your good offices to ameliorate the physical and psychological trauma our families who were roughly thrown out on the streets as a result of the demolitions, have suffered.”
“We insist that we did not do any wrong in all the transactions we have had with FAAN at Runview/Mercy Estate and should, therefore, not be treated with such indignities as have been meted out to us by the Airports Authority.
“Please, save us from this inhuman treatment by an agency of government that ought really to treat citizens with some level of empathy, respect and dignity,” the group pleaded.
Hon. Nnaji’s team was later received at the FAAN head office in Lagos, where the Airports Authority’s officials and representatives of the Runview/Mercy Estate’s Landlords Association strove to justify the demolitions.
In his remarks, a former Chairman of the Landlords’ Association (name withheld) in whose tenure the plots on which six of the demolished houses were built were enumerated and receipts given for payments made, thanked FAAN for demolishing the houses, claiming that the victims defied the Association’s order not to build on the property.
According to findings, it was incidentally the same former Chairman who negotiated, at a commission, the purchase of the plot on which one of the victims built his now demolished house.
