Abdul-Rahman Abubakar
4 May 2008
Abuja — The probe of the Ministry of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) being conducted by the Senate Committee on FCT came to a crescendo last week when the controversial erstwhile minister Nasir el-Rufai began his defence.
El-Rufai is billed to appear again before the panel on Wednesday to answer many more questions regarding his tenure as FCT minister. Sunday Trust brings you excerpts of the former minister's submission last week on the most contentious issues.
On land committee
When I came to the FCT the records were manual, they were disorganized and there were all kinds of problems. The president had given a directive to me to compile the land register and that was taking time. It is one of the issues that the president said I should address because he gave me a letter. The number one item was to computerize the land register within the shortest possible time. Because of that I had to suspend land allocations until the register was computerized. We only started allocating lands towards the end of 2004, therefore for fifteen months while I was minister I did not allocate lands. The only lands we allocated were those for schools or for public purposes, we did not allocate any land for residential purposes.
I did not find any land allocation committee in place when I took office. What I learnt from people I interacted with including some state governors was that there is no state in Nigeria that has a land use allocation committee because the members of such committee use their positions to go beyond their brief. Members of land use allocation committee are supposed to use their positions to advise the minister on land use matters or on land revocation or compensation. The experience not only in FCT but in other states of the federation was that when you make people members of the land use allocation committee they will allocate land when really it is not their duty. Allocation of land is something that starts with the officials and end up in the governors' or ministers' office.
There was no land use allocation committee in the FCT when I came. I don't for how long because I did not go into details. There was no land use allocation committee for me to dissolve and reappoint a new one. I then went to President Obasanjo and told him that he was the one that enacted the land use decree and this was what I got from people, including some state governors that I spoke with. So the president told me to set the act aside and concentrate on the twenty five thousand land application and dispatch them. When I took over there was no mention of any land use allocation committee in the handover note I got from my predecessor.
On demolition
I am trained as a Quantity Surveyor. I make a living from buildings so it is very painful and difficult for me to bring down a building. Please understand that, because the impression given is that I wake up in the morning and I go and demolish people's properties. I make a living from building. I built my first house when I was 29, I know that building a house is probably the most important emotional investment any one can make. I want the committee to understand that when we take a decision that a building be removed it is because it is necessary in the public interest. There are actually three categories of buildings that we removed and I will go through them. There are those with valid land documents but they made a mistake. That is whether the land has water line traversing like the case of the former chairman of PDP or under right of way or something that is valid building but violating. The other class is someone who has no papers at all and he builds but it is still an important investment. There is also the group that bought the lands from original inhabitants. When the capital moved from Lagos there was accommodation crisis and people came and used their savings to buy lands from chiefs and so on to build houses. They thought that land tenure system in Abuja is the same as where they came from. So these are the three categories.
Mr. Chairman I want to assure you that before we reached the decision to remove these buildings, we checked and cross checked. In fact the first hundred buildings that were demolished, I made sure I went and saw before demolishing. I want to assure, Mr Chairman that we paid compensation. You can call the National Assembly appropriation record. Every year we budget about N1 billion for compensation, but before you are entitled to compensation you must have C of O, you must have development plan. Once you have that we value the building and pay you based on replacement cost that is the provision in the FCT Act. We have paid and there are many that will not come forward because they don't have a problem.
You have been told here that 75,000 buildings were demolished. Mr. Chairman I want us to reflect on this, I was minister for four years, and there are 250 working days in a year. If every single day they were demolishing without stopping that will be 1000 days, it means that we were demolishing 75 buildings in a day. I don't know where the officials got this information. It cannot be correct because there are not up to 75 bulldozers in this town to demolish such buildings in a day.
On Anyim's property
When I became a minister we were informed that former ministers of FCT were still signing land allocations and Certificates of Occupancy. I did not believe that anybody that has held that position will be signing and backdating papers. So we started investigating, I got the EFCC then to open a file in the FCT to help us investigate all the so-called land syndicates. And they arrested two people, one called Engineer Success and the other called Alhaji Kamba. Engineer Success did his NYSC there, after which he wasn't employed but he had enough people within the system so he set up this forgery syndicate. They were doing everything; they will give you allocation letter with correct signature, they were printing C of Os in Kaduna, we will give you the report of the EFCC that investigated it. They had their printing press in Kaduna and were printing our C of O. They could sign the signature of every minister that had served in the FCT. Engineer Success was arrested and prosecuted, Kamba was arrested but they could not find enough charges to prosecute him and they let him go.
Many people were victims of Engineer Success. He was very clever because he can identify areas that have been planned by the FCDA but not allocated and he will get very important people; he particularly targeted senators. If you take our original C of O and place them side by side you will not know the difference.
Senator Anyim Pius Anyim was one of such victims, Senator Zwingina was one of such victims, and Dream Plaza who came here was one of such victims. The issue that we had and we even took to the federal executive council was that someone has been given land and all his papers are fake. He has no title, he has no development plan, he got the C of O, and building plan approval was all fake. What do we do and they have built the house. Of course the legal position is that the building be removal without compensation.
So I said to President Obasanjo we have a case here, which we have to go to council to discuss because if you demolish that building and allocate the plot to someone he has to uproot the foundation to use the plot so it is a waste. We regularized such allocations because many of them were guilty; when we availed some of them with the documents they were shocked because they thought Success was an official of the FCDA. Late Senator Enwerem was a victim. So if you look at how we treated Senator Anyim, Zwingina and Dream Plaza there is a bit of difference.
In the case of Anyim it is because it was a residential area and conforms to the master plan, that we said he will pay a penalty. Initially the building was valued for him to buy back from the government because the building belongs to the government, that is the law. And after that he showed me how much he borrowed to build the place and I went back and it was reduced to twenty something from a hundred and something million. But where Dream Plaza and Zwingina had their buildings were supposed to be parks, so they had to be removed. This was what the federal executive council decided in the meeting of July 19.
In the case of Dream Plaza, he came to me and I felt sorry for him, they were all victims of Success. I say look I am sorry this has to happen and I gave him two plots and I will give you the details of what we gave him because he did not say that when he came here.
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