No land grabbers shall go scot-free – Wike

The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, has said that the FCT Administration would deal decisively with land grabbers regardless of personality.

Wike issued the warning when officials of the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria, REDAN, FCT Chapter, paid him a courtesy visit in Abuja on Thursday.

“Land grabbing is not new. Some of your people are part of it; some staff of FCT are part of it. As a government, we will do all we can to see that we deal squarely with anybody who is involved, no matter how highly placed he or she might be.

“It is a terrible situation we found ourselves in. People grabbing land; people illegally acquiring land, just for the purpose of becoming rich overnight,” the minister said.

He explained that every day, people write the FCTA, demanding land allocation to develop a certain number of houses in the city.

He, however, said that many people were doing that just to obtain a land title and at the end of the day, nothing was developed.

“They will do all they can: take our land and sell it to people for development. For me, that is not helping us to reduce the housing deficit, no. That is just a way of taking government land and enriching yourselves at the expense of the government,” he said.

According to the minister, to address the challenge, the FCTA had decided that developers must show financial capacity before land would be allocated to them in FCT.

He added that a reputable commercial bank must also write an undertaking that the developer has the financial capacity for such development.