DAYO AYEYEMI writes on the pains and hopelessness of victims of recent building demolition in Lagos State and the attendant controversies.

WHAT happened on I.K. Peter Street, off Murtala International Airport, Ajao Estate, Isolo, in the last one week, is purely a case of how not to build or buy landed property in Lagos.

For the first time, the peace of the neighbourhood, which hosts choice properties, was disrupted as 13 buildings in Runview Estate fell to government’s bulldozers for allegedly lacking planning approvals/permits that should have been issued by the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA).

Since the demolition took place, there has been public outcry about the wastages and untold hardship perceived to have been inflicted on the residents in the midst of over 17 million housing deficit in the country.

Relevant authorities which authorised the controversial demolition have also been labouring to justify the exercise that has attracted widespread condemnation.

However, barely one week after the demolition of the 13 houses, affected residents, including a journalist, are yet to come to terms with what has befallen them in a neighbourhood they claim to have lived for over 10 years without any hassles.

For Mrs Chioma Ekejuba, who is in her mid-40s, and her 11-year-old son, Martins, the centre no longer holds, as the demolition of their apartment has thrown them into the street.

Since the demolition, she and her son have been roaming the street in search of where to put their heads.

She shared her experience with Saturday Tribune at the scene of the demolition.

She narrated how she received calls from her son while at work regarding the invasion of the community by the state government’s Task Force officials who came with bulldozers.

According to her, by time she rushed home to find out what was happening, her house was already being demolished without being given the opportunity of to evacuate her belongings.

Five days after the demolition, Ekejuba said she just managed to put up with a friend on another street not far from the location where her own residence used to stand.

Since she couldn’t remove any of her belongings before the bulldozer pulled down the building, the woman said she had been wearing the same cloth in the last five days.

Stating how unlucky she was, Ekejuba said she moved into the house about a month ago, as a tenant, noting that she paid N650,000 as rent for the building which comprised six flats and a boys’ quarter.

She claimed to be ignorant of the status of the property before moving in but the management of FAAN came to serve the landlord notification papers one week before the demolition.

As it is now, Mrs Ekejuba said she has nowhere to lay her head. She is planning to get some planks and build a makeshift house on one of the empty plots in the community. She appealed to well-meaningful Nigerians to come to her aid.

Ekejuba said: “I am a tenant here, and some of my belongings are still in the rubble. It all happened last week Thursday when coming from work. Already, my son had been calling me and I couldn’t pick the calls. Immediately I got close to my house, I saw people, especially my neighbours, running helter-skelter. Looking up, I saw that they had already demolished our house.

“As I talk to you, I have not really got anywhere to stay. There is a friend I kept my belongings with.”

The most traumatic experience, she said, was her son (Martins) that couldn’t stay in school since the incident, claiming that the boy said he could not assimilate anything in school due to the ugly experience.

“I tried to send my son to school today. The boy couldn’t stay. He ran back home on the excuse that he couldn’t cope; that the trauma of the demolition was too much for him to bear,” she said.

When asked about her landlord, Ekejuba said he wasn’t living in the neighborhood, but she suspected there is political undertone to what happened in the neighbourhood.

According to her, the rumour was that the 13 buildings were demolished as a part of the fallout of the last elections in Lagos State. “Why is it this period, after the election, that they came to demolish our buildings? We were told they had been coming to serve papers and that they collected N5 million yearly from the affected landlords,” she said.

There is also the case of another affected resident in the community who hired a bus to take him and his entire family back to the South-East after the incident, Saturday Tribune was told during the visit. The resident, Diana Egbunefu, who stayed in a makeshift structure, said she had lived in the neighbourhood for 10 years.

Egbunefu, who disclosed that she lived in the makeshift house with her parents, said there was no place to relocate to, even as a bulldozer was bringing down the house next to her temporary residence.

She said it was true that the FAAN management had been pasting notices on houses around the neighbourhood, asking people to vacate and claiming that the affected property were sitting on gas pipelines.

“They have been coming to serve papers. They always pasted them on the wall or frontage of each gate,” she said.

During Saturday Tribune’s visit to the vicinity, none of the landlords of the affected buildings was sighted and none could be reached as of press time.

A journalist’s story

Media reports had identified a former editor of The Guardian newspapers and ex-Deputy Managing Director of the New Telegraph, Mr Felix Oguejiofor Abugu, as a victim of the demolition exercise. He also confirmed being an affected landlord at a media parley but efforts by Saturday Tribune to engage him one-on-one on further developments in the landlords’ engagements with the authorities in charge of the exercise didn’t yield any fruits. Calls to his mobile phone were not answered and text messages sent to the mobile line were not responded to.

However, in his message to the media on how he got entangled in the permit web, Abugu, now the Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of an online newspaper, AbeyaNews, confirmed that he lost his house to the demolition carried out by FAAN and LASBCA.

Estimated to have cost N70 mllion, Abugu said in the report that the house where he and his family lived until Friday, April 28, stood on a plot of land bought 12 years ago from the Baale Adejumolu family of Isolo and located within the Runview/Mercy Estate owned by FAAN, some five kilometers to the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMA), Ikeja, Lagos.

According to FAAN sources quoted by the media, several reasons accounted for the demolition of the 13 residential buildings that fenced off an undeveloped part of the FAAN land (mainly vegetable farms) from the Runview Estate. One is said to be that the narrow swathe of land running from one end of the estate to the other and housing the demolished buildings, with a street in-between to separate them from another set of houses is “a red zone”.

A “red zone” means It is too close to the airport for any non-aviation development to take place.

Two is that the stretch of land is encumbered, meaning that underneath the land are structures that cannot be built upon such as a disused fuel pipeline running from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Ejigbo, to MMA, through less than half of the land bearing the demolished houses.

At a media parley in Lagos, Abugu was quoted as saying: “I am a distraught land owner here and my family is on the street right now, but let’s be clear about one thing: neither the government of Lagos nor its agencies had anything to do with the demolitions per se. The land belongs to FAAN and it simply paid for the services of the concerned agency of Lagos to demolish our houses and, I must add, unjustifiably. So, away with the drivel about Lagos targeting anyone or group.”

Narrating his ordeal, Abugu further disclosed: “Every single landlord in what was once known as Richfield Estate before it changed to Runview/Mercy Estate after ownership of the real estate reverted to FAAN, bought their land from the Adejumolu family. I bought mine in September 2011. Some bought much earlier. But all of us bought from the Adejumolu family on the basis of a court judgment shown to each and every buyer by the family, indicating that the land belonged to the family.

“However, ownership of the land reverted to FAAN after another court ruling whereupon FAAN took over the estate and renamed it Runview/Mercy Estate and invited landlords to come for ownership regularisation. Even those of us from the side that has now been destroyed were invited but were later denied the privilege of regularisations for reasons that were never cleared. Indeed, I believe that the reasons for this wicked demolition of our property that some bought 15 to 20 years back and subsequent displacement of our families and disruption of our lives are as untenable as they are varied.

“The truth is that FAAN had no justifiable reasons to demolish our property. If it regularised houses even across the street, what was so offensive about our side of the street that they had to destroy our houses at a time like this and send our families out on the streets?

“How does one handle this type of situation? This is a property that one put in practically everything one had to be able to develop and live with one’s family and now gone in one hour of merciless destruction! I just don’t know what to do”.

LASBCA, FAAN speak

Justifying the demolition, the managements of FAAN and LASBCA said the buildings constituted security issues to the MMIA, Ikeja, and were situated along a gas pipeline.

The General Manager of LASBCA, Gbolahan Oki, said the buildings lacked planning approvals/permits, a contravention of the state building laws. According to Oki, the authorities had been engaging with the owners of the buildings since 2016, adding that four notices were served on them before the demolition.

The GM blamed Incessant collapse of buildings on attitudinal issues among residents, who refuse to comply with relevant laws, adding that if the buildings were not removed because of sentiments, the consequences would be dire, as more than 200 buildings might be consumed in the event of gas explosions.

He advised Lagos residents to always involve the agency before commencing construction as none of the buildings certified by LASBCA had witnessed failures.

Backing LASBCA, General Manager, Business Development, FAAN, Mr Hycienth Ugwu, said the buildings were erected on the airport land acquired by the Federal Government in 1944, 1972 and 1975 for the expansion of the international airport.

According to him, the existence of the buildings in the area constituted a security risk to the airport as terrorists could shoot down aircraft taking off on the runway.

Citing the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards, Ugwu said no building is allowed to be erected close to the perimeter fence of the airport.

“There is also a limit to the height of buildings within the airport,” he added.

All these measures, according to him, have been violated as some of the owners of the affected buildings used the perimeter fence of the airport as their own fence, while breaking some parts of the fence to access the airspace, resulting in theft of materials through the axis.

He explained that the action could lead to the closure of the airport by the ICAO, resulting in loss of substantial revenue to government.

He further claimed that the situation had persisted since 2015, when encroachment was noticed in the Ajao Estate axis of the airport.

He said: “After some discussions with them, some appealed to the President for regularisation. About 200 buildings were regularised, but others, which constitute safety, security and operational challenges, could not be regularized.

“They are illegal without any form of title and document on the land they are built on. We tried to stop them, but they continued building till now that LASBCA is helping us with the demolition.”

Experts decry magnitude of destruction

Following the controversial demolition, the built environment stakeholders have expressed displeasure over the issue.

Some of them said that demolition of houses of such magnitude could widen the accommodation deficit in the country, which is already about 20 million.

Experts that spoke include the Executive Director, Housing Development Advocacy Network (HDAN), Mr Festus Adebayo; Chief Executive Officer, Financing and Partnerships Africa Limited, Emmanuel Akinwumi; real estate professional, John Olubayo, and Managing Director at Oct5 Limited, Jide Odusolu.

They wondered why government refused to stop the building development at the early stage but waited for owners to complete them before moving in to carry out a demolition.

They argued that although the government had enough reasons to conduct the exercise, the building construction ought to have been stopped long ago.

According to them, preventive measures could have reduced the high volume destruction witnessed in the course of pulling down the buildings.

Some experts even suggested that the subscribers should institute a joint suit against the developer for selling them properties with defective title and the state government named as a co-defendant.

“Government has enough reason but why allow the developers/owners to develop them to that level? It should have been stopped long ago,” they said.

However, Managing Director at Oct5 Limited, Jide Odusolu, blamed the developers, citing his experience when leading OPIC.

He said many people like to act with impunity on the presumption that with begging, public outcry and emotional blackmail, they would be absolved.

“Two of my most brazen experiences involved an industrial park and an agricultural zone.

“In both cases, people resisted all persuasion, chased away planning officials and would not desist with illegal developments. In both instances, after enumeration, we discovered over 300 illegal structures,” he said.

According to him, over 40 per cent of such illegal developments were either on infrastructure paths or waterlines. He added that when demolition was activated, uproar happened with most people refusing to admit the illegality of their actions.

However, stakeholders said the Lagos State government or FAAN has the responsibility to create artificial buffer zones around the perimeters of the airport, known as the “second fence”.

“It is a major safety risk to human and aviation operations, same way regulation does not allow waste dumps or landfill site within one kilometer of the airport perimeters because they attract birds which are big risk to aircraft engines in the course of their search for food,” one of the experts said.

Another expert said it was sad to see such wastage. “I feel for the owners, but we all need to develop a culture of abiding by existing property laws and regulations. If you don’t abide by the law, you don’t have a leg to stand on,” he said. (Saturday Tribune)