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His name is Mallam Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai. He is a minister in the Presidency. He is in charge of the Federal Capital Development Authority. He was formerly the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, the body responsible for the privatisation business of the Federal Government.
His name is Mallam Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai. He is a minister in the Presidency. He is in charge of the Federal Capital Development Authority. He was formerly the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, the body responsible for the privatisation business of the Federal Government. As far as the House of Representatives is concerned, he stands condemned and must not be allowed to hold any public office throughout his lifetime. Many commentators have described the decision of the lawmakers as hasty.
About 300 staff of the FCDA have been dismissed, retired or prosecuted and jailed for engaging in land racketeering, a development that has distorted the master plan of the FCT. el-Rufai has vowed that Abuja would never be another Lagos - a glorified slum. He is not the first minister of the FCT, but he would go down in history as the boldest and the most daring. Some people believe he has carried the vision too far. Yet, there are still others - maybe in the minority - who believe that the job has to be done no matter who is hurt.
When he assumed duty as FCT minister in 2003, his mission was clear: President Olusegun Obasanjo was said to have told him in clear terms to sanitise Abuja. The President also reportedly told him that he would require a substantial dose of strong will to get the job done.
The issue of the demolition of illegal structures in Kubwa has raised a lot of questions. Kubwa was planned as a resettlement town for the original inhabitants of Abuja. Originally they stayed at Wuse and Asokoro and Maitama areas. They were relocated to Kubwa and houses built for them and farmland given to them. The plan was nurtured by FCDA in 1982. The Kubwa project itself was built around 1985 and 1986. When the original inhabitants were moved there, many of them sold the houses and moved elsewhere. But when the seat of government moved to Abuja about that period, Kubwa became a residential hot cake because of the low cost of houses. The growth became phenomenal. Some farmlands were set aside and allocated to some personalities and groups such as the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture. As the city grew, these farmlands became part of the city. New houses were built.
Staff of the FCDA took advantage of this. They started selling plots to ignorant people. Most of the buyers never cared to go to the FCDA land registry to crosscheck the status of the land sold to them. When the FCDA moved in, they ordered that further construction should stop. A consultant was then commissioned to draw a master plan for a greater Kubwa with all the amenities of a modern town.
But construction work continued, even at night. A close look shows that most of the people who built these houses are very important people who simply build and sell or rent to ignorant members of the public. Such houses have been pulled down. The other aspects of illegal houses belong to civil servants living in government estates who have decided to become land sellers. In collaboration with FCDA staff, they decided to carve out plots to people so that every fallow land within the estate has been taken. This was where the bulldozers moved in.
Just after the House took a decision to investigate the demolition of houses in Kubwa, Senator Uche Chukwumerije appeared on the floor of the Senate with a motion. He asked the Senate to raise a committee to look into the demolition before taking a position on the necessity or otherwise of the exercise. It was adopted. On Monday, the committee headed by Senator Idris Kuta summoned el-Rufai to attend the inauguration of the committee. The minister was excited. First, he said the Senate did the unprecedented when it asked all the members of the committee to declare their pecuniary interest in the issue. The minister himself said he had crosschecked the assets of all the committee members and found that none of them was affected by the demolition exercise. el-Rufai gave a deeper insight into the demolition exercise, its legality and why none of the victims would go to court and win or even get an injunction to stop him.
This was part of what he told the Kuta committee: 'I wish the committee in the lower house that did a similar investigation had given us the same opportunity to cross check the pecuniary interest of the members of the committee. But it did not. The reason why we have Abuja is because Lagos has become impossible to be the Federal Capital of Nigeria as well as capital of Lagos State. Lagos has become such a grand mess that as far back as 30 years ago, the government of Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo realised it. And since then, this country has spent huge resources, not naira, to make Abuja what it is today. And what was happening in 2003 was that the city was becoming Lagosified. In many ways all the bad habits of Lagos were slowly coming into Abuja. And this was why the President said we must do everything to try to recover the glory of Abuja. That is what we have been trying to do. And in that process, of course we are human, we can make mistakes. Of course, when mistakes have been made and you want to correct them, you inflict pains on the people who deserve the pain and those who do not deserve it. The pain must be inflicted so that corrections would be made.
'We have tried to be consultative, we have tried to discuss with the people to show them the logic in all that we are doing. We try to carry people along and show them alternative ways of living in Abuja. For anybody to think that as minister administering the FCT on behalf of the President, our goal is to be wicked, our goal is to kick out people from their homes, our goal is to make Abuja impossible for the poor, is being unfair and to be quite candid, irresponsible. Governance is not about making people suffer because we are a democratic government. When I came into office, I discovered that our land records were messed up, there were cases of double allocation. The same plot of land given to more than two people. The first priority was to computerise the land register. For that reason we stopped all land allocation. I was the first minister of the FCT that spent two years in office without making land allocation because I wanted to clean up the record. We don't just wake up in the morning and say this building should be removed. We follow a process.
'In the area of land racketeering, many innocent Nigerians have lost billions of naira to land racketeers in Abuja. These racketeers include people outside as well as a large number of people within the FCT system. We have sacked not less than 300 people for land racketeering. We have taken every step to ensure people who play any part or have been part of cheating others have lost their jobs. We have dismissed some so that they lose their benefits. Some are still being investigated by the EFCC. Just a month ago, the EFCC found someone, a level 12 officer, with 132 letters of allocation in various names in his house in the course of our investigation. Just last week, another ex-officer of FCDA was found with 300 plots.
'There are three Acts of the National Assembly that cover our actions in the FCT. The first is the FCT Act, which empowers the FCDA and lay down ground rules for the development of the FCT. That Act sets out two conditions that must be satisfied while building in the FCT otherwise you can be prosecuted. You need the Certificate of Occupancy of the land you are building on and you need your building plan approved by the FCDA and no other authority. What the laws says again in the Land Use Act 1978, which also covers our operation is that we must pay compensation to anybody who has the two documents but has his house demolished. We are required by law to pay him monetary compensation for the building and give him alternative plot of land somewhere in the FCT. These are the requirements of the Land Use Act. The third piece of legislation is the Nigerian Urban and Regional Planning Act of 1992.
'We never take down any building until we satisfy ourselves entirely that it breaches the provisions of these three laws. In Kubwa alone, we have taken down 178 buildings and none of these people have been successful in court because what we have done, we did it in compliance with the law. When you go to court, the court will ask you for these three documents before they listen to you. We try to comply with the law. We are human and I cannot say we have never made a mistake. But so far, we have not been convinced by anyone that we have made a mistake. And we have been doing this for one and half years. No one has come and say 'you have removed my building wrongly." I will give you few examples. These examples include the residences of former Inspector-General, Musiliu Smith and a former Chief of Defence Staff. They had houses behind Asokoro on the main waterline supplying Asokoro District. It was our mistake.
'We gave them the land. They have certificates they have everything. But immediately they started the building then we realised our mistake, we stopped them. God forbid, if those buildings had settled on the water pipe and it breaks, the whole of Asokoro District will not have water until reconstruction was done. Now, this is the kind of disaster waiting to happen. And we have a duty as government to prevent them from happening. And it is far better to remove the building and pay compensation than to allow that route to be blocked. That was what we did and we are required by law to pay them compensation and give them another plot of land.
Since I came into office we have budgeted at least N500 million every year to compensate proper titleholders if we demolish their property that is those that have Certificates of Occupancy and have approved building plans."
But many believe that history will remember el-Rufai as a man who inflicted pains on many people in a bid to correct a generational misdemeanour. The thinking is that when the intimidating roar of the bulldozers is silenced and the debris of demolished structures cleared, the Abuja of the founding fathers would emerge. But before then, a lot of people believe el-Rufai would be long gone as minister and the aggrieved victims must have forgiven and forgotten about the pains of today.
The PUNCH, Thursday, June 23, 2005