By Christopher Oji
a landlord, Mr Samson Ubasinachi Ekweozor, has accused his tenants, Mr. and Mrs Raycherry Onyia of refusing to pay their utility bills, beating up his wife and setting his apartment ablaze.
The landlord who is based outside the country alleged that after beating his wife, Mr and Mrs Onyia, allegedly moved their property away from his apartment at Amudalatu Street, Agodo-Egbe area of Ikotun, Lagos and set it ablaze to punish him for disconnecting their electricity and water supply. The embattled landlord in an interview with our correspondent, narrated his predicaments in the hands of the tenants since September 2013.
According to him, trouble started when Onyia, being one of the first-three tenants to rent his house bluntly refused to participate in periodic environmental sanitation, pay his house rent, electricity, water, waste disposal and other utility bills.
The landlord said that at a time, he directed his lawyer to issue quit notice to Onyia; but Onyia instead of complying, threatened to use his own lawyer in frustrating the quit notice and used all forms of manipulations to elongate his stay in the apartment.
Ekweozor said that after pleading to be of good behaviour, he allowed Onyia to continue staying in the compound, but when he again arrived Nigeria on December 27, 2016, he found out that Onyia continued be a trouble maker.
According to the landlord, on April 28, 2018, he traveled back abroad and in March, 2019, he was informed that Onyia’s wife attacked his wife with weapons over unpaid electricity bills, slashed her eyes and she was rushed to hospital. The injury inflicted on his wife propelled him to fly back to Nigeria and decided to quit all the tenants.
The landlord said that he further directed the electricity supplier to disconnect Onyia, until he pays the backlog of his bills. He also cut off Onyia’s water supply. This action, he said, infuriated Onyia, who threatened to beat him up, bring down the entire building with acid and destroy the water pipes in the compound.
He said that immediately after Ikeja electricity disconnected Onyia, he illegally reconnected his light and when his wife confronted him, Onyia’s wife pounced on her and grievously wounded her and disfigured her face.
Onyia’s wife’s on her part said: “As if disconnecting our power supply was not enough, he disconnected the water supply. It was at that point that my husband asked him to refund part of our rent if he truly wanted us to leave. One day, I went to take water from our bowl close to the window to prepare food for our children and as I was returning to our apartment, our landlord suddenly appeared and held me from behind and his wife used a sharp object to attack me and slashed my face, neck and other parts of body.
The landlord said he reported the unprovoked attack at Ikotun Police Division, under the watch of CSP Emmanuel Onah, who detained the Enugu State born tenant, directed them to pay the treatment bills of the landlady but they refused to comply.
The landlord said that Onyia, having noticed that his wife sustained severe injuries, reported the case at the same Ikotun Police Division as attempted murder under a new DPO, CSP Johnson Adagba, who after considering the facts presented and level of injuries sustained by both parties, partly treated the matter as a case of two fighting.
However, the DPO detained the landlord’s wife for three days and at the end of investigation, the landlady was asked to pay the hospital bills of tenant’s wife. While narrating his own side of the story, Onyia, allegedly reported that the landlord and his wife physically assaulted his wife for his refusal to quit their apartment after the expiration of a quit notice.
He told reporters that he was asked to vacate his apartment barely one month after packing into it without any plan to refund him the money he paid.
He accused the landlord of inflicting permanent scars on his wife’s face.
“Before I knew what was happening, I was covered in blood. It was my screams of pain that caused my husband who was inside our apartment to run out and took me to the Police Station and we were giving a letter and referred to the hospital for treatment. I spent two weeks in the hospital. Infact that I didn’t die was not short of a miracle because there was so much blood everywhere.”