Human Rights Monitoring Agenda (HURMA) has urged the Lagos State government to prevail on some persons using their closeness to top government officials to terrorise law-abiding landlords and residents of Ijegun/Ijedodo/Ijagemo axis with threats to demolish their houses and confiscate their lands.
It alleegd that the intimidation was being carried out on the false pretence and information that the Lagos State Government under the leadership ofGovernor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is abandoning the original master plan which certified those properties as legally acquired and out of the Right Of Way (ROW) of government for a new undisclosed one that urgently seeks to demolish their properties.
During a protest at Lagos State House of Assembly on Monday, Executive Director of Human rights monitor, Buna Isak said findings of their organisation revealed that those pushing the plot – some of them in highly placed positions – were the real culprits who had gone to acquire lands and properties on the designated right of way, adjacent to the one in question,that the road infrastructure is meant to traverse in the original master plan.
Isak accused those intimidating the landlords of desperately seeking to upturn and divert the original plan in order to save their own skin and make innocent law-abiding citizens pay for their own brazen effrontery at law-breaking.
He said he believed Lagos State cannot, and would not descend into a jungle where some devour the rights of others by sheer reason of might.
“The Ijegun/Ijedodo affected landlords committee at whose instance this petition and protest is backed upon did not only purchase their properties legally as distinct from the other area designated as right of way for the road project as obtained in the original Master Plan of 1972 (and as seen and described in the original layout with the Ministry of Lands and the Office of the Surveyor General of Lagos State), their right of legal acquisition of those lands was also recognised in the adapted version of the original master plan by Alimosho Local Government under the Alimosho Mega City Plan 2010-2020.”
“This goes to show and is also a proof that the area in question which lies and situates at the right hand side of NNPC pipeline and connects five junctions of Ijegun through Ijedodo to Abule Ado with about 800 houses including 11 places of worship neither encroaches on Government acquisition, nor violates the master plan. It neither contravenes the Right of Way nor is it built under any high tension transmission lines. It is neither under any NNPC corridor nor built on any drainage system to warrant demolition, and the people have lived in that place for over 40 years,” he said.