Army threatens to demolish Ibadan estate, residents send distress message to Buhari, Oyo govt

Residents of Mesiogo Estate in Alagbede Village of Ibadan have protested the plan by the Nigerian Army to demolish their houses on or before November 15, 2017, calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to “use his good office to prevent the military from throwing house owners, who are mostly retirees, into untold hardship.”

They called on Buhari, who they described as the father of the nation, to stop the ministerial committee from the Ministry of Defence, which has threatened that it had the order of the ministry to demolish houses in the estate.

This was just as they called on the Oyo State Ministry of Lands and Survey to expedite action on their request to know the true status of their lands.

According to the residents, the military had come into the estate on October 26, 2017 to mark most of the 49 developed and undeveloped properties in the estate for demolition.

The landlords of the estate, speaking with Sunday Tribune through their spokesperson, Mr Amos Ishola, after a meeting with the ministerial committee saddled with the responsibility of demolishing houses, maintained that their lands were not part of the Army’s acquisition land.

They maintained that they were ready to go through the legal processes to verify whether their lands encroached on the Nigerian Army’s land, noting that while they awaited the response of the Ministry of Lands and Survey in the state, which had visited the area to do a charting and verification, the military came on June 22, 2017, claiming that the estate encroached on the Army’s land, despite having cleared the estate of not being on their lands before.

The residents stated that the military committee had a mandate to act on eight communities reportedly encroaching on its land and that Mesiogo Estate was not among those communities, alleging that the committee only included their estate after they claimed that they discovered that it sat on the military’s land when they got to the field and that the Army was erecting another pillar to capture their estate.

The residents, who cited a letter from the Nigerian Army dated 16 July, 2003, which cleared Ajigbotosho family land, in Alagbede Village, as not belonging to the military, maintained they had clearances from the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Ministry of Works and that some of the landowners even had Certificates of Occupancy signed by a former Military Administrator in the state, Col. Ike Nwosu.

The letter, sighted by Sunday Tribune, had cleared the Ajigbotosho family land, which sat on the linear area with Mesiogo Estate, saying that after the military studied documents and charting of the area using military acquisition survey plan, the Alagbede Village land was not in the Nigerian Army acquisition land.

Ishola stated that the Mesiogo Estate land was acquired by the late former Governor Kolapo Ishola and laid out as a commercial plot sold to people, some of who had developed their property and lived there for 20 to 30 years.

Sunday Tribune gathered that the residents had been given till Wednesday to present their papers proving that their land did not encroach into the Nigerian Army’s land or they would lose their houses if they refused to pay amounts stipulated by the military committee.