Bode Olagoke
Original inhabitants of Garki, Akpanjeya and Apo communities of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have again raised alarm over what they described as the “failure of the FCDA to implement the agreement reached by the resettlement and compensation committee” headed by the Minister of State for FCT, Oloye Jumoke Akinjide.
In a statement issued yesterday by the Magajin Garki, Mr. Joel Jezebe, he expressed their dissatisfaction on the slow pace of work by the implementation committee, adding that the minister’s recent threat to forcefully move the communities in two months would not be realistic.
The statement said: “The Garki indigenes will not be moving in two months time, because that statement is not correct and we have not seen any signal that will warrant our movement, if she had put anything in place by now we would have been able to see practical results and we are not chickens or animals that you can move anyhow. Even at that if you want to move animals there must be a process.
“In fact, we have lost total confidence in the FCT administration because we have not been hearing from them, the administration has nothing to offer our people and if the government does not stop the developers in our communities we will mobilise our youths to stop any further work on the commercial plot at Garki resettlement area.”
It added that the government had stopped the indigenes from erecting any structures that could serve as an alternative for their children.
“We the indigenes don’t know our fate anymore and our children are growing up, what do we tell them if they want to build? Since the minister of state set up a committee and we finished our work and she set up another implementation committee but nothing has been heard about the resettlement issue. We have been entirely cut off from the exercise and some strange people are busy developing the commercial plots allocated to our communities for different purposes.”
Jezebe said the indigenes were peace-loving Nigerians, “but will no long accept injustice and illegalities to prevail in their land.”
