By Eze Eluchie, Esq.
(Tel: 08175177880;
Email: ezeeluchieassociates@yahoo.com)
One action which the Governor Hope Uzodimma administration has adopted which is faultless and stands the government as one which is willing to right historical wrongs, is the ceding of the Commissionership for Lands and Surveys, and the Chairmanship of the House of Assembly’s Committee on Lands and Survey, to indigenes of Owerri West Local Government Area. Clearly, the Governor must have felt that if persons from Owerri West were in charge of the Land issues in the State, the injuries meted out to the people of the LGA by previous administrations in Imo State, in the area of wrongful seizure, confiscation and misappropriation of their ancestral lands, would be stemmed.
Good enough, upon assumption of Office, the Governor had severally and publicly asserted that he was not coming into Government to steal or seize people’s lands, rather he would restore sanity and justice to the Land acquisition and allocation process in Imo State. This gave the people of Owerri West, and other communities which had been victims of landgrabbers across the State, a sense of hope and high expectations that wrongs will be righted.
For several years now, the people of Owerri West LGA who had suffered serious deprivation by virtue of their lands being forcefully acquired under the Land Use Act, had appealed to current Government to cede the offices responsible for lands in the State to indigenes of Owerri West. Thus the appointment of indigenes of Owerri West LGA as Commissioner for Lands and Chairperson of the IMHA Committee on Lands, was greeted by peoples of the LGA with pomp and pageantry, as finally, an opportunity has arrived for those whose lands had been wrongly seized to have redress. On this, Governor Hope Uzodimma deserves some applause.
It was thus with consternation that the indigenes who ought to have brought succor to the people of Owerri West LGA, turned around and unleashed an unprecedented, vicious and debilitating Land-grab war against the people of Owerri West. From Okuku, Nekede, Avu, Obinze, Umuguma, and even Irete, communal lands, farmlands, markets and private lands were seized purportedly under the guise that the Governor had authorized such unlawful and unconstitutional seizures. The people of Owerri West suffered untold hardship with their supposed ‘sons’ at the helm of land matters in the State. More worrisome, in prosecuting the land-grab war on the people of Owerri West, the appointee of Gov. Uzodimma, boasted that they were acting for and on behalf of the Governor in their desperate illegitimate efforts at depriving the people of Owerri West of their lands.
With the temporary disciplinary actions Gov. Uzodimma has taken to ameliorate the unsavory situation of forceful land seizures of indigenous peoples, it is hoped that the people of Owerri West LGA will have some reprieve and be protected from unscrupulous elements masquerading as agents of the State Government to steal the people’s lands.
Those who think that exposing criminal actions of appointees of government tantamount to ‘exposing a brother’, are very much misguided. A brother would in the first instance, not swindle or steal from his brothers. And where your ‘brother swindles/steals from you, such ‘brother’ is worse than a brood of vipers.
For the umpteenth time, the people of Owerri west are advised that the Land Use Act under which lands are ‘compulsorily acquired’ by State Governments is a nation-wide statute, and that lands can ONLY be acquired by Governments for Public purposes only. Such lands cannot be reallocated to individuals. Lands compulsorily acquired by the Government under the Land Use Act, reverts back to the original owners when the acquiring Government reneges on the earlier reason for the acquisition, and begins to allocate such lands to individuals.
Hopefully, Imo State will get its Lands system right and the unnecessary and relentless exploitation of indigenous peoples, particularly those whose ancestral lands have been mercilessly taken away from them in the name of the Capital territory, would cease.
Governor Uzodinma and the State Government should take a cue from the digitalized Land registration and acquisition system operational in Lagos State. Under such system, there is transparency in land allocation, acquisition and transfer, such that everything regarding lands is available upon payment of statutory search and or documentation fees. The perennial exploitation of people of Imo State, particularly those around the Owerri Capital Territory, who have suffered from decades of uncouth, criminal and illicit practices from land grabbers, masquerading as agents of the State, must stop.
0 Comments