Monumental waste
•Sad tale of abandoned and decaying FG estates
By IKENNA EMEWU(ikenna@sunnewsonline.com)
Saturday, November 7, 2009

•RUIN: Federal Secretariat, Ikoyi PHOTO: THE SUN PUBLISHING

Living index

If you deliberately take a tour of places in Nigeria, even in your locality to government establishments, you will find one striking factor-abandonment of facilities.

It has become part of the culture of the nation to procure, build, install, equip today and abandon tomorrow as if we were hypnotized while doing this only to wake up the following day to the reality that we don’t need such. Sometimes, you may wonder if is state policy to waste and allow resources of the nation to fall into disuse without anybody making efforts to redeem them.
Saturday Sun, irked by this trend, went round Lagos to some monuments that have been left decaying for years to find out if there has been a let-up recently only to discover that the situation is worsening everyday.

Their values are in trillions of naira in today’s real estate market. These are not enough to make us find a way of putting them to use.

While some of the monuments are embroiled in policy conflicts and sale disputes, some have been considered so to speak of no value or use for ages. A good example is the former House of Representatives building at Onikan whose doors were shut on December 31, 1983 at least officially. Twenty-six years down the line, the doors as Saturday Sun discovered on Monday this week remain shut and padlocked. The only sign that there would have been activity sometime there in the past are the doorpost signs that still stand. At the first floor of the gigantic structure on top of a carved two-wing door is an inscription ‘Chambers’.

There in the chambers business of legislation and fisticuffs among near-hooligan lawmakers used to hold. After General Muhammadu Buhari with his brother, Tunde Idiagbon sent their younger one in arms, Brig. Joshua Numel Dogonyaro to announce the expulsion of members of that House on December 31, 1983, the door is inaccessible. In year 2000 when the Oputa Panel sat at the adjacent former Senate Chambers, this reporter out of curiosity paid a visit to the House of Reps building twice to discover that the structure which would cost Nigeria hundreds of billions of Nigeria to build today is no longer of any value. During that call at the House building in 2000, the doors to the chambers were open. With a gentle push, the two heavily carved chocolate wooden doors come apart.

You could stroll into the chambers and look around without anybody asking questions or to ask questions. But the visit this week was different. The two doors are tightly locked and there is no access into the chambers. But you could have a good walk up the flight of stairs on the soft padded red rug to the last floor of the building. One thing is common on the floors – the red rug is dirty, stinking with the dampness created by patches of wetness occasioned by water maybe from the roof or partially opened windows. The House had fallen from glory and remains in a worsening and dwindling state every passing year.
The quality of cars at the entrance – old rickety junks ranging from decayed and decrepit 505 salon cars, Peugeot 504 and the rest says much about what the interior looks like. What is left of the cars is the Federal Government of Nigeria number plates still attached to them. It was funny spotting a new Toyota bus marked “Office of the Speaker of House of Representatives Press Crew’ parked directly opposite the entrance to this rejected edifice. There were also other House of Representatives members’ cars all over the place. It was the same with cars of Senators that littered the premises.

The fate of the House and its abandonment is a subject of buck passing. When Saturday Sun called on the Liaison Officer in her office at the premises, there were lengthy stories about the building and its sorry state. The big woman was not going to talk as she was reported to be busy, but her man who volunteered to stand in said the management of the building is not in the hands of the National Assembly therefore his madam cannot say much. He revealed that the ownership of the House vests on the Presidency because of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s peculiar privatization policy that made the presidency own a NASS liaison chambers.

A reference to Room 30 of the premises, upstairs, to meet the President’s Liaison Officer did not help matters. She was said to have gone to the airport to receive her colleagues expected from Abuja and would not be around likely for the rest of the day.

These people who were told why the big woman was sought spoke unofficially to persuade that it was wrong to say the building was abandoned. To them it is neither abandoned nor rejected, and no adjective to qualify the structure could satisfy them unless it is ‘good’. They wanted Saturday Sun to believe there is nothing wrong with the structure and all is just fine. They would not accept the position of the reporter, but sure they were given enough facts to understand that one was not a novice to the structure or the area. It was not a matter of belief, there is decay and abandonment and even worse epithets boldly written on the entire structure, and it has been so for close to 30 years.

The former Senate Chambers where the Oputa Panel, the Brig. Oluwole Rotimi Presidential Panel on Federal Government Landed Property and few others sat there in the past is also locked. But immediately such panels wind up, activities cease in the area. The major thing that keeps the premises busy is the presence of the Commercial and Probate Division of the Lagos High Court that uses an adjoining three-storey building.

During the Rotimi Panel sitting, this reporter can attest that the Lagos State government had applied to the FG to transfer ownership of some of these decaying facilities to them for proper use. But that request was not considered. Yet the FG has not remembered what to do with these monuments till now.
Since December 12, 1992 when IBB changed the government shop to Abuja, more erstwhile bubbling centres in Lagos have been left as abode of lizards and rodents.

Saturday Sun also called at the National Theatre, Iganmu after leaving Onikan to see more ruin and decay. It is a great resource in state of irredeemable waste. The interior of the theatre built in 1977 as central venue of the FESTAC 77 is a great disappointment. That 3000 capacity theatre with a 700-seater conference hall is a dereliction. It only comes alive during the festive periods when the outer premises bubble with fun, but the interior remains a haunted ghost place with paint-pealed walls, collapsed windows, ceilings and light fittings.

An effort to step into the inner recesses that are open would be rebuffed by a thick network of cobwebs and the stench of stale poorly ventilated and unused compartments.

It is the same story with the National Stadium built in 1972 and abandoned finally in 2002. All the money spent on that structure, a 45,000-seater capacity later upgraded to 55,000 in 1999 when the nation hosted the U20 FIFA World Cup was meant to serve a utility longevity of 30 years only. That seems to be the reason the FG abandoned this giant edifice, a national monument, built to host the 1973 All Africa Games and later hosted the 1980 and 2000 African Cup of Nations. Because the FG built another stadium at Abuja at N68b in 2003 to host another All African Games that year, the Surulere stadium is now left for Indian hemp smokers, robbers, pick pockets and rats. You can’t but pity Nigeria on a visit to the stadium. The seats at the pavilions have decayed and fallen apart into heaps of waste plastics only fit for the refuse bin. No matter how hardened, you can’t venture to the back of the stadium in the daylight. Before you could come that close, your courage to do that would dissipate in the thick of the heavy stench of faeces and burning Indian hemp.

The entire structure is a huge heap of ruins, and going there tells you a story that Nigeria has more than enough and benefits some fresh blood in her veins making wealth and throwing away. The premises is populated by fierce-looking hoodlums who lie about in the day sleeping and menacingly looking at any strange face as if trying to ask what you might be looking for trespassing their rightful heritage. But as you drive into the stadium premises, some men at the gate collect a toll of N200 and issue you paper which they make sure you show at exit. Who owns the collection and what it is used for nobody is ready to tell you. Just pay or step aside, no questions are needful.

Take further step to No. 15 Marina, Lagos you would see another ruin at the former NITEL towers. The 32-storey towers and lighthouse was built by Costain Nig. Plc. in 1979 to serve as the head office of the NITEL, the former national carrier. Today, NITEL Towers is a ghost. It used to enjoy the reputation of the tallest building in West Africa, but today it has appropriated the reputation of the tallest ruin in Africa and the tallest sign of ignominy of a nation of wastage put together.

In those days, it was called NET Building. The structure was just four years old when some floors were burnt, the fire started in the night when a party was going on somewhere up there in the sky. Those were the days when Alhaji Ibrahim Tahir was the Chairman of the NET. Later that same year, the same Tahir was drafted to supervise the controversial guber election in Anambra State that ousted Jim Nwobodo to enthrone the late Chukwuma Onoh for the NPN at all costs. To show how good the FG wished the NET towers that took the nation fortunes and remained a great heritage, President Shehu Shagari heard of the disaster and never stopped his trip to India the following day.

In 1998, Lagosians saw the building draped in shroud from head to toe, and little did people know that it was its funeral rites attire until NITEL left for Abuja, hired and paid N500m to Abubakar Audu, former Kogi governor annually to rent his house as NITEL head office in Abuja while its multi-billion estate at the prime zone of Nigeria was bade a final goodbye to rest in peace. What is left of the giant structure is the skeleton of what used to be the neon-signpost announcing the premises. The structure means nothing in value to Nigeria any longer and gets deeper in decay every passing day.

The last point of call was the former Federal Secretariat, Ikoyi. That one is a total write-off. The premises that had been partially burnt is sealed off in a make-shift fence all round. An entry through the Dolphin Estate end brings you to a gate permanently closed. There are signs of intended reconstruction that has been stopped by the Lagos State government, according to someone spotted at the gate. Some years back, the FG sold the estate to Resort International Limited at N7billion. The estate firm planned to rebuild the gigantic estate into luxury flats. But the Lagos government says no. The contention is that the place is not designated a residential area and would infringe the city original plan if allowed to stand. As a result, this too is another sour point in the landscape of the nation’s decayed and useless mega properties and monuments. With the days to come, these estates of great value may totally crumble.

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