Renowned novelist,
Chimamamda Adichie has accused billionaire Arthur Eze of grabbing the ancestral
lands of her people.
According to
her, the billionaire has used his money to grab the lands of Abagana, Ifitedunu
and Ukwulu, all neighbouring towns to Ukpo; he’s now done same to to the people
of Abba.
Read her
post:
My hometown
under siege
One night in
July, the signboards disappeared. The people of Abba, my hometown in Njikoka
Local Government Area of Anambra state, woke up to see that the signboards were
gone — the signboard that said ‘Welcome to Abba Town’ had vanished. The
signboard mounted by the state government that said ‘Drive safely through Abba’
had vanished. Every signboard that announced Abba’s boundary had disappeared.
In a country
where signboards exist to make communities visible, this was an act of erasure,
a way of saying to a community: you no longer exist. An attack on a community’s
autonomy. An aggression. But how could it have happened? There are laws, after
all, and signboards set up by the state government cannot arbitrarily be torn
down. It happened because the Nigerian police accompanied people at night to
commit this illegal act. Witnesses saw them: the police vans, their flashing
lights, their guns. And it happened because a Nigerian billionaire, Prince
Arthur Eze, is financing a campaign of intimidation in order to win a land
dispute.
Land disputes
are depressingly common all over Nigeria – Awka-Amawbia, Umuleri-Aguleri, and
Ife-Modakeke are some well-known examples – but perhaps what makes Abba-Ukpo
different is the brazen meddling of a wealthy man. The land in question is
called Agu Abba – a vast stretch of woods, farmland, and a market, Oye Abba,
with roofed wooden stalls. All land cases are complex, but here is a simplified
history of this case: In 1967, shortly after the Nigeria-Biafra war began, Abba
sued a nearby town, Ukwulu, for trespassing on its land. A state high court
ruled in Abba’s favour.
After the
war, Ukwulu questioned the legitimacy of the ruling, as Biafra no longer
existed. Abba then sued again in 1975. The case dragged on until 1985 when
Ukpo, another nearby town, formerly a witness for Ukwulu, made a surprising
volte face and joined the suit, claiming some of the land as theirs. The suits
were subsequently consolidated and in 1999 a state high court ruled in
Ukwulu/Ukpo’s favour. Abba got a stay of execution on the judgment. Then
something strange happened: the record of proceedings in the case suddenly
disappeared. The Anambra State government set up a panel of inquiry, which sat
for three months and returned empty-handed to say they could not find the court
records.
Abba filed an
appeal but the appeal failed because the record of proceedings, which are
indispensable materials for the determination of the appeal, could not be
presented. Abba then appealed to the Supreme Court. In a lead judgment, Paul
Adamu Galumje referred to the disappearance of the records and asked both
parties to go back to the state high court and ‘sort out the mess.’
So Abba went
back to file suit in state court, where the case is currently ongoing.
“Do court
records just get up and walk away?” a spokesperson for Abba said. “We all know
Prince Arthur Eze paid people to destroy the records. We don’t have money but
we will fight him with the truth in court.”
But before
the case could proceed in court, the siege of Abba began.
On June 19,
2019, Oye Abba market was full of people trading in vegetables and yams when
police vans screeched in and policemen leapt out, shooting tear gas canisters,
pushing and hitting traders and buyers, asking everyone to leave the market
immediately. People ran. Children cried. Two weeks later, more policemen
arrived at the market, destroying the wares of innocent people. And again a few
days later. The terrorized traders then abandoned the market and set up on a
busy intersection at the center of Abba, a less than ideal site, but the only
option left to them.
I began to
ask questions and soon learned that it wasn’t just mass harassment of market
traders, there was also a more targeted harassment of individuals who had
spoken up for Abba in the land dispute.
On July 3,
2019 policemen from the Force Criminal Investigation Department, Area 10, Garki
Abuja arrived early in the morning and arrested three people from Abba. A woman
was about to unlock her shop on the main road in Abba when policemen jumped on
her and arrested her. A man was about to leave home for his construction work
site when policemen barged through his door, scaring his family, and bundled him
away. They were detained first at the State CID for one week and then were
moved to Abuja where they were detained for two weeks.
“On what
charges?” I asked a young man, a member of the Abba Youth, who has witnessed
the events from the beginning.
‘They had a
long list of charges, including conspiracy and attempted murder,” he said.
“Attempted
murder of whom?”
“It’s all
nonsense. They fabricated charges, based on zero evidence, and took them to
Abuja just to intimidate them and make them give up our land.”
The point of
these illegal arrests is indeed intimidation. But many in Abba were not cowed.
The Abba town union organized a peaceful protest along the Enugu-Onitsha
expressway, on the spot where the signboards were torn down, to raise awareness
about what was happening. They had no weapons, only their voices. Shortly after
the protest began, the police arrived in large numbers. Some witnesses said
there were at least 100 policemen, which in a small protest in a small town is
akin to a hostile invasion by state machinery. The police fired tear gas to
disperse the protest. The young man I spoke to was there, and told me how his
eyes burned for days afterwards.
“There were
so many tear gas canisters, up to 300, and they were brand new. We all know the
police in this area don’t have that much. Who paid for the tear gas? Arthur
Eze,” he said.
Abba Women
also organized a protest to appeal to the governor for help. Hundreds of women
gathered at the government house, all dressed in somber black, carrying signs,
and singing mournful songs. Watching the video, one cannot help but be moved by
these women, by their determination, their orderliness, their commitment to
peaceful means of protest. They wanted the governor to step in and stop the
police harassment of Abba indigenes. One of the cardboard signs they carried
read: Stop police harassment of Abba. Another, to my surprise, read: Arthur
Eze, emulate Alhaji Aliko Dangote. He does not use his money to intimidate
people. He uses his money to invest wisely.
The Abba town
union wrote detailed letters of complaint to the DSS, the state governor and
the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. An excerpt from the letter to
the President reads: “It is no secret that the I. G. P. Adamu Mohammed is being
used by a known moneybag in Ukpo, Prince Arthur Eze, to intimidate and silence
Abba people like he did to their neighbouring Abagana community.”
As a child I
was often skeptical of historical stories in which the homeland of the
storyteller was always in the right. And so my natural skepticism made me ask
why Prince Arthur Eze would engage in this violent campaign of intimidation,
and whether perhaps he was being unfairly maligned. Where was the evidence? How
could we be sure that Prince Arthur Eze was indeed responsible?
“Arthur Eze
wants to build a university named after him, and Ukpo doesn’t have any land big
enough and so he wants to take our land,” the young man said.
Prince Arthur
Eze has a documented history of muscling his way into contested land – in the
past few years he has used the police to terrorize another nearby town,
Abagana, after which he annexed their land. But perhaps the clearest evidence
that Prince Arthur Eze is the mastermind of the harassment in the Abba-Ukpo
case comes from his own words. After the Supreme Court judgment, Prince Arthur
Eze called the traditional ruler of Abba, Igwe LN Ezeh and asked for a meeting
on May 21, 2019 at the Geneva Hotel in Okpuno, a town near Awka.
There, Prince
Eze made a proposal: if Abba agreed to abandon the court case and share the
land with Ukpo, he would call off the police. Igwe LN Ezeh told him that Abba
people wanted to conclude the case in court. There are witnesses to this
meeting. It was after this meeting that the police harassment of Abba indigenes
went into full force.
Today in Abba
people live in fear. Rumours swirl every day. Somebody says there is a list of
Abba people to be arrested. Another says the police are coming from Abuja to
arrest the town union members. Another says the community school, partly
located on the disputed land, will be completely demolished. Some fearful
parents keep their children home from school. When a big car with tinted
windows drives through Abba, the people worry. Some men skulk away. Who will be
arrested today? Who will be harassed? Who will sleep in a cell tonight?
My
87-year-old father, a retired university professor, is bewildered. He is from a
passing generation of principled Nigerians who do not understand how a single
individual can buy and control the Nigerian police force. After my father heard
of an Abba man abducted while driving through Ukpo, his empty car left
abandoned by the roadside, he asked my brother to take a longer route to a Pharmacy
rather than drive through Ukpo. He feared for my brother’s safety. I fear for
my parents’ safety. I fear for my hometown now unfairly living in distress.
Most
recently, on September 6, 2019, Abba people woke up to see a Caterpillar
demolishing the structures of Oye Abba market, while armed policemen and mobile
policemen stood guard. Abba people watched, helpless and hapless, as the
economic center of their small community was destroyed. The Caterpillar also
demolished the walls of the nearby community secondary school, only days before
students are supposed to return to school. Now the school walls and the market
stalls are
a jumble of
broken wood and cement, and a symbol of a brokenness in our system. Abba-Ukpo
might well be a provincial land dispute, but it speaks to larger issues in
Nigeria. A wealthy individual has turned the Nigerian police into his private
terror group. Those deemed protectors of the people have become their
attackers. Those supposed to uphold the law are now the practitioners of a
particular kind of lawlessness lubricated by crass wealth.
Not all
members of the police seem to be so shamefully on sale — the Anambra State
Commissioner of Police, and the Divisional Police Officers of Ukpo and Abagana
refused to harass Abba because they believed it to be illegal. But the
consequences for them were swift: they were unceremoniously transferred to
other states.
I don’t know
who has a legitimate claim to the land – it has for decades been known as Agu
Abba and farmed by Abba people in the often-unwritten rules that govern
customary land ownership. But that is what the courts should determine, in a
process free from meddling. Court records should not disappear. No community in
Nigeria should be terrorized by state machinery. No private citizen should have
the power to turn the police on an entire community. Injustice is stalking
Anambra state and the rights of every citizen should be protected. It is in
protecting the rights of others that we protect our own rights, because we
create a system of rights from which all can potentially benefit.
As I ended my
conversation with the young man, he said, “Please don’t use my name. The police
will come and abduct me and take me to Abuja. My family is poor. I don’t have
anybody to bring me food in Abuja, not to talk of bailing me out.”
I was struck
by his use of the word ‘abduct.’ Some members of the Nigerian police have
soiled its name and its legitimacy. The Nigerian police have been used to cause
great harm in Abba. The Nigerian police must now refuse to be used any longer.
The Nigerian police must show that it is not for sale. The Nigerian police must
stand up for justice and fair play. Stop the harassment of innocent Abba
citizens, and let the courts decide.
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