Hudu Yakubu, Abuja
The Minister of the Nigerian Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Mohammad Musa Bello has thrown his weight behind the ongoing demolition exercise embarking by the Ministerial task team on city sanitation within the city.
The Minister throw his weight behind the task team on City sanitation while answering questions from journalists in Abuja Nigeria’s capital.
While stressing that, the exercise is a routine and aimed solely at correcting infractions in city’s landscape, he added that it was at correcting infractions of the Master plan.
The Minister who ruled out compensation for owners of illegal structures, assured that the FCT Administration will pay for any land or structures legally acquired by authorities to provide infrastructure or public facilities.
According to him; “Is something that occurs as part of the daily work of enforcement.
Unfortunately, in the recent past particularly during COVID-19 when most of the inspectorate staff were not able to cover the city, a lot of people went and started building illegal structures.
“The policies and guidelines for building in FCT is very clear and well documented ,the laws are there.
“So what we are doing is basically to remove infringements on the issue of compensation will not arise because everything is illegal.
For instance, people decide to build on the road corridors and in most cases some of this building you will see that the administration might have given many notices to them but they still went ahead to build the illegal structures, so we keep demolishing.
“But there are some areas as part of our urban renewal and upgrade, if we need to take off building either to expand the road corridors or create facilities for essential services for social services obviously this once will be compensated.
It has always been happening“, Bello stressed.
Ongoing Demolition Aimed At Correcting Infractions Of Master plan – Minister