After several years of careful search for legal backing to its lands reclamation operations, the Delta State Government has disclosed that it has found the official gazette detailing its acquisition of parcels of land located on the Agbor/Asaba and Asaba/Illah roads, including the ones in the contentious Core Area 2, Okpanam, Oshimili North Local Government Area of the state.
This is even as the taskforce on the recovery of government lands has ruled out the possibility of shifting grounds in the regularization exercise, threatening to breathe down heavily on defaulters at the elapse of the December 31, 2016 deadline.
According to the gazette published by Authority on October, 10, 1991, the then Military Administrator of Delta State, Group Captain Luke Ochulor had on October 8, 1991, perfected all issues relating to the revocation of Rights of Occupancy and compensation of hitherto owners in pursuance of Section 28 of the Land Use Decree 1978.
Captioned “Land Requirement for the Service of the Military Government of Delta State of Nigeria”, the two-page gazette indicates that the then military government had called on members of the public with interest(s) in those areas to present evidence of such interest(s) to the Director-General of the state Directorate of Lands and Surveys within six weeks from the said publication.
Specifically, the gazette states inter alia that a “notice is hereby given that the right of occupancy in respect of the following parcels of land at Asaba/Okpanam in Oshimili Local Government Area, Delta State of Nigeria, which is required by the Delta State Government for the over-riding interest to wit: for public purposes within the Delta State of Nigeria and, in particular, for the establishment of projects incidental to the establishment of the capital city of Asaba is hereby revoked”.
Besides, the gazette, a copy of which was exclusively obtained by The Pointer, affirms that “any person who shall hinder or obstruct the government or any person employed by the government or acting on government’s behalf from taking possession of the said land or any part thereof is liable on conviction under the provision of the decree above mentioned to a fine of N5,000 or to imprisonment for twelve months”.
In an interview held in Asaba, the state capital, the Chairman of the Taskforce on the Regularization of Lands in Core Area 2, Okpanam, Chief Frank Omare said that with the discovery of the 25 years old gazette, there is now a legal credence to the land regularization exercise which, according to him, had been faulted by some individuals for lacking the whitepaper authenticating government’s ownership of the parcels of land comprising the core areas in the state.
“Some people have accused the government of oppressing them, claiming that the land is a community land and that government has no document to show for its ownership. We have been searching for this document since the past eight years and some persons in government practically told us the gazette was lost.
“For over one month, I could not sleep well because of the issue. The Commissioner for Lands and Surveys joined forces with me in the search for the document. It was as if the document developed hands, legs and wings with which it kept moving from one place to the other. But today, we have been able to shoot it down. We didn’t forge the gazette; it is real and authentic”, Omare explained.
The taskforce chairman who insisted that meaningful progress cannot be recorded without government stepping on some toes, urged all the affected land owners in the core area to regularize their lands on or before the last day of this year, warning that at the expiration of that deadline, “the needful must be carried out by the government of Delta State”. He also added that the regularization exercise will extend to “all government lands in the state, which people have encroached into thinking that government is on vacation or sabbatical.”
Recall that the land regularization exercise has generated diverse opinions, especially among the over 2,190 affected land owners in the Core Area 2 at Okpanam town. The state government under Governor Ifeanyi Okowa has consistently shown much benevolence and consideration as it relates to the cost of regularization, which the affected persons are required to pay.
From the initial cost of N1.5 million, the governor approved a reduction to N1.05 million, which later fell to N850,000 and now, it has been further reduced to N750,000.
In spite of this, some of the landlords have vehemently opposed the exercise, claiming it is not legally sustainable, particularly as the state government could not provide the legal whitepaper with which it acquired the said parcels of land about 25 years ago. A fall out of this discontentment was the writing of an open letter to Governor Okowa by some of the affected landlords on November 22, 2016.
In the full page letter published in the Vanguard Newspaper, the landlords urged the governor to discontinue the exercise and abandon whatever reason that motivated it, particularly in the light of the festering economic morass which, they said, had made life quite unbearable for them.
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