Risikat Omoluyi, 67, a resident of Magbon in the Ibeju-Lekki area of Lagos State, was living peacefully in her first son’s home until about three months ago.
To her, the building, which belongs to Shina, her first son, was her sanctuary after working all her life raising her children and empowering them to be responsible adults.
But Omoluyi’s life trajectory would be permanently altered. Government officials went to her community and marked some buildings for demolition, including Shina’s buildings, and that was the beginning of her end.
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Accepting the finality of the demolition order to pave way for the Lagos-Calabar coastal road, Omoluyi, according to her son, said, “This will not happen in my lifetime.”
An affected buildingPhoto Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/EQToday.
Even before the commencement of demolitions in these communities, Shina’s mother had died. She died on the third day the buildings were marked for demolition. EQToday learned that another person also died in Magbon because of the order.
“I’ve been mourning many things since my two-room self-contained and one-room self-contained buildings were marked for demolition: I have been mourning the sudden death of my mother, the imminent loss of my buildings and the fear of where and how to forge ahead when they finally bulldoze the buildings, which are all I have in my life,” Shina told EQToday.
While Shina’s building has not yet been bulldozed, many houses have been demolished in Magbon, Iberekodo and Museyo communities.
On February 3, Fatai Moshood Ekundayo, a medical doctor and founder of Mosfat Combination Health Centre in Iberekodo, was caught by surprise and shock when some government officials arrived with a bulldozer to demolish his health facility. At this time, some patients were still on admission in the hospital.
Mosfat Combination Health Centre being rebuiltPhoto Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/EQToday
According to Ekundayo, the metres of land initially marked didn’t affect his hospital. Therefore, he had no reason to panic or make preparations to relocate. But on the day the government personnel wanted to commence operations, they insisted they had to go beyond the marked area. This would then claim a part of the medical house.
“They came and said they would extend beyond the pegged point. I began battling for words to appeal to them to stay within the marked area. But that fell on deaf ears. We told them patients were inside. They said we should discharge them immediately so that they could do their work,” Ekundayo told EQToday on May 15.
Some patients were abruptly discharged, while others were moved to a temporary location for them to continue receiving the necessary attention. But this came at a cost that the doctor and his team never prepared for.
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After the frantic effort to make the officials stick to the initial metres of land marked fell through, Ekundayo took it upon himself to engage some people to carefully demolish the affected part rather than leave it to the whims of the state officials.
A site signpost Photo Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/EQToday
Such are the stories of grief and panic residents and families whose properties in these typically low-income, agrarian communities have been subjected to over the ongoing construction of the N15 trillion coastal super highway being built by the current federal government.
Awarded to HiTech Construction Company Ltd., owned by Gilbert Chagoury, President Bola Tinubu’s long-time ally, the 700-kilometre road will run through nine states, including Lagos, Ondo, Ogun, Bayelsa, Delta, Port Harcourt, Cross River and Akwa Ibom.
VAGUE COMPENSATION PROMISES
While many residents of Iberekodo and Magbon communities have lost their homes, there have been troubling uncertainties as to whether the government will give them any compensation.
Not only have the living residents lost their homes and personal effects, the dead ones have also lost their resting homes to the road construction. Many families buried their dead ones in or beside their houses in these communities.
On both sides of the existing road that leads to the Lagos Free Trade Zone, where the Dangote Refinery is situated, there are hundreds of houses located within the 42 metres of land the government has mapped out to use for the coastal road. But the demolition started with the houses on the left side, leaving people on the other side in anxiety about when the reality of losing their homes would dawn on them.
Houses belonging to Hassan Sainat Alaba’s family have been demolished. These included her grandfather’s building of eight rooms and her mother’s house comprising six rooms and one shop.
A section of some affected housesPhoto Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/EQToday
Beyond that, the body of Alaba’s grandfather, who died 18 years ago, had to be exhumed because of the development. The family has now reburied him somewhere else. This happened to many families who had dead ones within the length of land marked for the road construction.
“I am more than 50 years old now. My grandfather built this house long before I was born, and I was brought up in the same house. But the government has demolished it. My mother’s house was not spared, too,” Alaba told EQToday last Wednesday.
“Losing a house in which you were brought up can be a difficult experience. It is even more painful when you have to disturb your long-buried, dead loved ones. It brings back tearful memories. It’s like a stab in the heart.
“They paid us N30,000 per grave, which was too low compared to the expenses we incurred. To exhume his body alone, we paid N24,000 to those we engaged. We incurred other expenses from our personal purse.”
Several residents interviewed by EQToday mentioned that they had not been paid compensations.
On May 1, David Umahi, the Minister of Works, presided over the well-televised payment of N2.75 billion monetary compensations to some property owners affected by the construction. “Today, we are paying over N2 billion in compensation just from channel 0 to channel 3,” Umahi said.
EQToday could not determine whether Iberekodo and Magbon are within these channels 0 to 3 mentioned by the minister. However, it is a fact they are within the first 47.47 kilometres that run through Ahmadu Bello in Lagos down to Lekki Deep Seaport being funded by the federal government.
A resident, who identified as Balogun Olamide and whose grandfather’s single storeyed building of 15 rooms and mother’s building were brought to the ground, said her family was unsure the government would pay compensation.
A surveyor at workPhoto Credit: Sodeeq Atanda/EQToday
“We heard the government has even paid some people in Lekki. That’s how it has been; it has been a story from a far distance. They are not even saying anything about us here,” Olamide said.
Yet, the rubbles of the houses have been transported to a land owned by a developer for the demolition official’s personal financial gains, according to some of the residents.
On May 14, the Federal Ministry of Works convened a meeting called “Focused Group Stakeholders’ Continuous Engagement/Workshop” to interact with affected communities. A community representative at the meeting told EQToday that the ministry failed to provide any assuring statement as to when property owners would be compensated.
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“They only told us that it would be paid before the end of the year. It was at that meeting that they also told us that the road has been rerouted to run through the wetland at the back of the Ikerekodo, but we are not convinced yet. We have been pestering them to get the talk about rerouting published. Once that is done, our fear about further destruction of our properties would be resolved. We don’t want mere talks without publication,” said the representative.
He described the statement as vague and unassuring.
A site engineer, who said he had no authority to speak with the media and asked not be to named, told EQToday that compensation payment would be in phases. “If anyone is saying that the government isn’t talking about compensations, that person is lying. We have marked 42 metres on both sides. We have perfected plans for payment, and I am saying it categorically that they would be paid soon. The process is in three stages: identification of affected properties, evaluation of those properties and payment proper.”
He said that the first two stages had been completed, leaving the last phase unresolved yet. Furthermore, the engineer stated that the demolition carried out so far was “a partial demolition”. “Because it was partial, they were allowed to salvage some building reinforcements, such as roofing sheets, windows and others,” he said.
WATER SCARCITY COMES IN
Ever since the destruction of well-water sources in Ikerekodo, some residents have found is difficult to fetch water for their household needs. And for each of the well destroyed, residents have only received N30,000 as compensation.
When asked for comments, the official earlier quoted claimed that money paid as compensation was not officially from the government but from their “site runnings”.
“We have agreed with the residents that compensations will be paid for their buildings. The government has not paid for demolitions. When they want to pay, it will be in full. What we have paid them was from our site runnings, not from the government purse. It was we, the field supervisors, who decided to pay them from our site runnings,” the official said.
“The amount we paid varied. There were those we gave N25,000, and some got N30,000. There are documents that backed this up. We have been transparent as much as we can.”
Notice of the meeting convened by the works ministry
The residents are now saying that the money was too small, saying a concrete ring was N24,000. According to them, unverified reports indicated that what the government had allocated for such a facility was N150,000.
They are questioning the field workers’ claim that they paid compensation for graves and well-water sources from the money meant for their field operations.
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“We only succeeded in mounting a lot of pressure, coupled with a threat to stop them from doing their work if they would not leave one well-water source for us until their main road construction is approaching the spot,” a resident, whose name is withheld, told EQToday.
The residents argued that it would be unsafe for them, particularly children who usually fetch water every morning before going to school, to be crossing the busy road.
Many households now have to rely on the only remaining water well to get water for their domestic needs.
The post Tinubu’s N15trn Coastal Road Killing the Living and Leaving the Dead Homeless in Ibeju-Lekki appeared first on EQ expose.quest.