We want a minister who’ll tackle Abuja land use abuse – Developer

What has being your experience with the Abuja estate market? Some say it’s saturated. There’s a decline in it because the political situation isn’t stable. And most people came into it through accident. You’ll see either a minister or a senator just coming to Abuja – all they believe is build a house and – […]

What has being your experience with the Abuja estate market? Some say it’s saturated.
There’s a decline in it because the political situation isn’t stable. And most people came into it through accident. You’ll see either a minister or a senator just coming to Abuja – all they believe is build a house and – of course, they paid so much to buy the land and so much to build a house so what they do is after building, they keep it there, looking for a huge amount of money which is not easy to come by.
So because of that there’re a lot of people who prefer to go to the satellite towns to settle. They don’t mind the inconveniences they endure to come to the city for their daily bread.
But for people like us who’re genuinely into it, I sometimes collect three-month rent, six-month rent from tenants. My properties are the cheapest in Abuja because where people, for a room, charge as high as N500,000 to N700,000, I don’t do that. If you’re able to pay me two, three, six months I collect it because I know that housing is one of the basic things any human being needs. I know how difficult it is for people to come by it.
Most of these houses you see unoccupied, you find that they’re owned by a minister, a senator or a House of Representatives member who got money from government, built what they wanted and put it there because from the way they got the money, that’s the way people collect the money from them to do the buildings for them.
So they want to recoup the money overnight and most civil servants here don’t have that kind of money. That’s why you see these houses empty. And they don’t mind. They can leave the houses for two, three, four, five years. But people like us, we feed from this our job so we go down to meet the tenants’ demands. Whatever their demands are, we must have a compromise.

We hear stories of investors buying land that’s not genuine. What’s your experience like?
This is one of the reasons we felt that it’s only credible people that should take the position of the minister of FCT because land business is the biggest business in Abuja. When el-Rufai introduced what they called AGIS, it went a long way to reduce this issue of land racketeering. In fact, a lot of land racketeers were arrested and locked up during el-Rufai’s time.
You would discover on one piece of land, more than seven people had allocation to it. There were forgeries everywhere. None of the area council allocations you could hold unto and say it’s genuine. They back dated allocations. People who left service in the last 20 years would still come back and find allocations.

When you say credible, who do you think of here?
In the last three years, I’d not been to Kano. But I went to Kano two weeks ago and when I saw Kano, I saw a transformed Kano. I went round the city centre and I discovered that Kano is another Mecca for Nigeria.
I had the belief that it’s only in Abuja that I could get all the comfort I wanted but I discovered that Kano is great because I saw streetlights. Go round Abuja, tell me how many streetlights that work. The traffic situation…the satellite towns aren’t any better.
When I was in Kano, apart from the Kano city, I went to some of the local government areas – I marveled! And I asked, when was this started because I was in Kano three years ago and I didn’t see things like this. Honestly, I had a thumb up for the governor, Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso!
Yesterday we came together as professionals to see how we can tell this man to abandon his senatorial seat and come reproduce what he did in Kano in FCT, honestly, we’ll all be happy.

We heard he built gigantic bridges too.
I thought we had bridges in Abuja but in Kano, I discovered that our bridges are nothing compared to what I saw in Kano. And I asked, was this man getting money from foreign sources? I was very curious and I discovered he was just able to raise internal revenue plus what he gets from the federal government. I marveled. I just want to appeal to his conscience, the people around him to join the professionals to appeal to the president-elect to see how he can give us a man like Kwankwaso.

But we once had an el-Rufai.
Yes, but el-Rufai has got a governorship seat. el-Rufai had a short time but you and I and whoever was in Abuja [that time] could tell you that el-Rufai did a lot, cleaning this city and we need somebody like Kwankwaso to take off from there.