Open Letter to Bauchi State Governor

Your Excellency, I would like to bring an ineffable injustice that threw poor people residing near the old airport of Azare town in the Katagum LGA of Bauchi State into a very pathetic state to your considerate attention.

Sir, in the early morning of 12 August, during a rainfall, some security personnel and court officials raided this and threw so many households out of their homes along with their belongings and locked them, claiming that they had gotten a court order to do so because the land that those people had built their houses on belonged to Dr Muhammad Bello Waziri Dogo.

It was reported that Dr Waziri wants to build a private hospital and this is why he wishes to seize poor people’s land

Sir, it is very painful to hear, according to eye-witnesses, that during the raid, one of the court officials pushed an eight-month pregnant woman which led to her hospitalisation.

Dr Waziri’s claim of the land has lingered for more than 15 years.

Constitutionally, as you know sir, even when a government wants to construct a school, roads, or pipelines, compensation must be paid to those who built their houses even though every land belongs to the government. Section 44 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal

Republic of Nigeria (as amended) provides that no individual’s land should be acquired without compensation. It should as well be noticed that payment of compensation for lands acquired should be prompt and not delayed unnecessarily.

When this illegal ownership of this controversial land was taken to the Court of Appeal by Dr Waziri during the immediate past administration of M.A. Abubakar in Bauchi, the court discovered that the entire people living in the area have their legal ownership certificates of the Land and Survey. The court dismissed the case because he did not present any certificate of ownership of the land.

Abubakar’s administration reconfirmed legal ownership of that land for those poor people and gave Dr Waziri a sufficient land near the federal government’s almajiri school here in Azare, on Maiduguri highway, but Dr Waziri rejected it, insisting that he would surely take back his land with ultimate power.

I therefore appeal to the considerate governor, Bala Mohammed Abdulkadir Mohammed, to intervene in this case. He should help wipe their tears away.

Abdulwaheed Tanimu, Unguwar Kaban, Azare, Bauchi State