By Innocent Obiora
Few weeks ago, I had reasons to visit Korodona – a slum in Asokoro, mostly inhabited by Gwari or Gbagyi people. There I met a striking irony of opulence and wealth on one side and extreme poverty and squalor on the other side. While the strangers who now inhabit Abuja enjoy the luxury of life, the natives live in abject poverty and makeshift shacks, some of them made of mud and roofed with rusty uneven zinc sheets.
What I saw in Korodona had been agitating my mind because everywhere the Gwaris were resettled that I had visited, the stories are the same. You find total abandonment and neglect in the midst of opulence. I have been wanting to write something on the need to comprehensively re-address the plight of the Gwari people whose right to self-dignity, right to own their native land, right to self-determination and right to sustainable livelihood have been grossly violated. But by sheer coincidence, Mr. Innocent Obiora who follows my writings posted this article via email: [email protected]. The contents of his write up, his submissions and reasoning reflected my thoughts. Hence, with his kind permission I am reproducing his opinion and with due credit to him.
Mr. Obiora wrote as follows: Not many Nigerians, including those who live in the opulence of Abuja city knows about the Gbagyi people who were the natives and original owners of the land before their land was forcefully taken away from them and carved out as the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria by the then Military Government. What happened to Gbagyi people when they were hurriedly driven away by the military government was similar to the dispossession of the black people of their lands by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Land has always been a thorny issue and it becomes more depressing when your ancestral land is carved out as a ‘No Man’s land’ by your own government who by the constitution ought to respect and protect your rights to own movable and immovable properties and to deal with such properties as you wish.
Whatever is the argument and to keep the records straight, Abuja is not a ‘No Man’s land’. It is a Gwari land inhabited by the Gbagyi or Gwari people for centuries. The Gbagi ethnic group or Gwarri as the Hausas call them lived in the hills and valleys of Abuja before the colonialists came to Africa. The Gbagyi people were living in peace, farming, and worshiping their gods and their ancestors. Their land was theirs and except few wars they had with other ethnic groups, the Gwarri people survived and inhabited Abuja as their ancestral home.
Calabar is considered as the first capital of Nigeria because it served as the capital of the Southern Protectorate. The British colonialists also set up their governments in Asaba and Lokoja and finally moved to Lagos in 1906. At one time, Calabar, Asaba and Lokoja were Nigeria’s capital cities and finally Lagos was their last destination. In all these capital cities, the British colonialists use eminent domain to acquire the land of the inhabitants, but they never drove the inhabitants away from the lands. They took the lands they needed and designated them as Government Reserved Area,( GRA) and these are found all over Nigeria today.
We all know what happed in Lagos, Magodo Estate, where the State Government used Eminent Domain to obtain land and probably did not fulfil their own arrangement as stipulated in the Power of Eminent Domain. That is why the original landowner had won in courts to get their lands back despite that the government had sold the lands to individuals who in turn had built houses on the land.
As General Yakubu Gowon envisaged in 1974, there was need to open a new capital in the centre of Nigeria due to congestions in Lagos, which was materialized in 1976 by successive government, neither did he or other governments plan to fulfil the law of Eminent Domain with the Gwarri people.
It bleeds my heart that Gwarri people have been treated as non-citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Now, people buy lands from the government instead of from Gwarri inhabitants. Whereas except the 8000 sq. kilometre of land upon which the capital stood which include the National Assembly, dozens of Federal Government buildings, institutions and suburban neighbourhoods and malls, the rest of the land rightly belongs to the landowners.
The concept of a landlord may be traced back to the feudal system of manorialism where a landed estate is owned by a lord of the manor, usually members of the lower nobility. This happened in the English Middle Ages where feudal lords owned the land that tenants worked. In exchange for rents, the lord of the land provided knights to protect the farmers. Nowhere in Africa can one find lands that are not owned by communities or tribes. The open Sahara desert is within many countries. There is no man’s land anywhere in the world. All lands are owned by the people that inhabit the area. If all these are true statements, then why did we chase the Gwarri away from their ancestral lands without adequate or no compensation? The universal land rule is that you can buy land from the rightful owners, and you can build on these lands but the original owners have the rights of the minerals inside their lands and after 100 years, the original owners have to negotiate with the buyers for another 100 years. The original owners have land rights and mineral rights while the buyers have only land rights that are renewable every 100 years. An American pastor, Dr Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The old military governments of Nigeria had used force to remove the Gwarri people from their ancestral lands and I am asking men who have conscious minds to use their power to set up local taxes which will be paid perpetually to Gwarri people. Gwarri taxes will help them for their uplift and for their survival. As we enjoy Abuja as one of the best cities in Africa, let us remember that the Gwarri people are one of us that have been robbed of their heritage.
As I write, there are elections in the capital city of Nigeria and outsiders who are not Gwarri are jostling to be chairmen and councillors. We should set up a new system whereby the Gwarri are empowered to determine their right to elect who should govern their local area councils and represent them. The Oba of Lagos is neither an Igbo, a Hausa, a Fulani but an original landowner of Lagos, a Yoruba King. The same way we should give the Gwarri the chance to install their natural ruler for Abuja.
The Gwarri people should benefit from our enormous resources when the new land owners are subjected to pay Gwarri taxes. Abuja is the only place in Nigeria where natives that own the land had been perpetually removed from their land without proper negotiations with the natives. With the introduction of Gwarri taxes, the justice that was denied the Gwarri ethnic group would be mitigated. The Gwarri people would be glad that their citizens’ rights as a tribe in Nigeria have been restored. Nigeria will always be a nation where all tribes should be respected irrespective of their economic and social background – a nation where no tribe is subjugated.