Abuja City Walk: How I recovered technology village from land grabbers – Wike

The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Nyesom Wike, on Thursday disclosed how he recovered an area meant for technology village in Abuja from land grabbers.

Wike disclosed that the land grabbers had forged documents of the area and were illegally subletting it out to unsuspecting members of the public.

Speaking during the official launch of the “Sales of Office/Experience Centre: The Abuja City Walk Development,” Wike disclosed that the area for the technology village has been there for the past 30 years.

According to Wike: “Your Excellency, let me sincerely again thank you today for coming in person to launch this project, this project is very important to us because it has to do with when you were appointed into office and was travelling to attract investors to the country. Your excellency let me say that these people were introduced to me by the Deputy Governor of the Central bank of Nigeria, Emem Usoro. When she came and said there are development partners who would want to partner with the FCTA to have a model of the Dubai City Walk and replicate it in Abuja, I said I have had experience of people coming to show 3Ds and I don’t think that I would be willing to do that, but she said no, these people are very serious.

“I said okay Deputy governor, invite them to come, and when they came we had the first meeting, they were in a hurry to go back and I said you are not serious, if you know that you are serious let us meet again tomorrow and to tell you that we are serious we would take you to where you want and let us show you the place.

“Luckily for us, like Gidado said they accepted, we all met and drove down to this particular place. This particular place is supposed to have the technology village which has been here for over 30 years. Of course, you know what happens, the agency concerned was renting it out to people who are doing all kinds of things.

“In fact, land grabbers who had even forged land documents to claim ownership of this particular place, I put my feet down and said no this is government property and I must drive this development to come to the FCT. What did we do? We had to make sure that bureaucracy doesn’t affect it.

“I became the chairman of the committee and I told the development partners that the only thing we can do is that we would have a memorandum of understanding where we would give a timeline, from this period to this period you have achieved this milestone, if that is not possible forget it and we would take our money back.”