Residents at war with estate owner in Abuja

Ugochukwu Nnah was groaning under the yoke of high rent in the main city of Abuja so when Penthouse Properties Limited announced that it had land for sale, he quickly subscribed. He has since built his flat and occupied. The challenge he faces now is getting management of the estate to provide necessary infrastructure.“Each one […]

Ugochukwu Nnah was groaning under the yoke of high rent in the main city of Abuja so when Penthouse Properties Limited announced that it had land for sale, he quickly subscribed. He has since built his flat and occupied. The challenge he faces now is getting management of the estate to provide necessary infrastructure.
“Each one of us paid infrastructure fee of N1457,000. For the past two years, we’ve been promised light [electricity]. About 15 residents are here without light for more than one year. We used our funds to make bore holes at the cost of N420,000.
“You can see the roads. Last year, I used N500,000 to rebuild my fence as a result of erosion,” Nnah lamented.
Similarly, another resident, Christian Iserame said, “As you can see, we don’t have the infrastructure on ground – there’re no roads, we don’t have water.
“My grouse is this. In some of our discussions, Mr Segun who’s the MD of Penthouse said he needed N65 million to give us light. We told him that many of these people are engineers. If he consults them, they’ll give him advice.”
Our reporter who visited the estate reported that residents are poised to do battle unless their concerns are looked into. After collectively writing the estate owner, urging him to act, they promise legal action.

Problems will be tackled in March
When contacted, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Penthouse Properties Limited, Mr Segun Olu Ibukun said the challenge he faces is presence of land speculators in the place. He regretted that he allowed subscribers to move into the estate on compassionate ground without first getting the estate commissioned.
“Some came to me begging that they would just move in because they could not pay rent any longer,” he stated.
Despite all this, he maintained that by end of March, water and electricity shortage will have been tackled. He appealed to residents to be patient as the problems are being looked into. He wanted the people not to forget that infrastructure bill given three years ago is no more realistic today.
According to him, only 40 percent of subscribers has paid its infrastructure levy.
Ibukun said because the estate is large and not all subscribers have built their houses, it is difficult doing water reticulation for every occupant at the moment because some are at isolated points.
He said he was initially against drilling of boreholes for the individual flats because of the long time impact it has – it affects water presence in the ground.
On the question of facility management, the CEO said refuse collection and disposal is borne by management at no cost to the occupants adding that he at a time bore the cost of cutting down grass and shrubs.
He acknowledged that people in villages around the estate sometimes pose security threat but that has been reported to the police.     
He denied that the green areas there have been sold.

Does govt really regulate?
Generally, mass housing programme was designed such that developers build houses then sell to buyers. It was equally expected that estate owners will provide infrastructure then include costs in the price of the property. Butwhat developers mostly do upon acquiring land from government is to beckon to prospective homeowners who are always anxious to get land to come and pay for plots.
Efforts to get the Director of
Mass Housing, Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA), Umaru Jibril to say whether he knows that estate owners and their subscribers are battling failed.
However, the coordinator of Abuja Infrastructure Investment Centre (AIIC) Faruk Sani maintained that government is not unaware of continual friction between estate owners and residents over infrastructure.
AIIC which is under the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) promotes and facilitates private sector participation in public infrastructure as well as coordinates the implementation of the land swap programme.
Sani said this rivalry is one of the reasons government promulgated the land swap policy. Under the land swap prgramme, Faruk reiterated that rivalries of this kind will cease because any investor given land must demonstrate capacity to provide infrastructure adding that this explains why investors are asked a bond of N350 million.
The estate which elegantly sits on 33 hectares of tabular land is located in Lugbe south-east extension under Abuja Phase IV. It was designed for 468 houses. It is subscriber-financed and built-and-supervised.