In the just concluded area council’s election in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, captured five out of the six area councils, therefore, giving opportunity to the All Nigerian Peoples Party, ANPP, to play a major opposition role in Gwagwalada area council.
When Friday magazine visited Compensation Layout IV in Gwagwalada, it was revealed that there are communities in the council begging for governmental presence, that since assumption and rounding off office by last administration under Mr. Zakari Angulu-Dobi, most of the communities have suffered massive neglect and misplacement of governmental priorities by the past administration.
It could be said that it remains a paradox that despite the fact that the FCT administration has continued to share monthly allocations and the Sure-P fund to the six area councils of the territory, a large population of Nigerians living in most communities in Gwagwalada are wallowing in abject poverty and serious neglect by past administration.
According to Emmanuel Abbey, residents of the community have been facing a lot of challenges, since the year the community started existing, which ranges from electricity, water, road and security, to mention a few, that each time they wanted to reach out to the government, for them to come and see what the residents of the community are going through, it was very difficult for them to do so, because they were given excuses why they could not meet with the leadership of the council directly.
“I personally wrote endless letters to the former council chairman, Mr. Zakari Angulu -Dobi and even tried on several attempts to meet him personally, but it was never possible, but we had interactions on phone, with promises of looking into our case, but since the first year of his administration, till the last year, nothing was done to alleviate our suffering in this community.
“When you go round this community you will see that there is nothing like road construction, we have not benefitted from the council administrations since this community came to existence. Even when we went to call for the assistant of Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) on the issue of electricity, they told us that they never knew that this community exists,” he said.
He said that they have been trying to do some of the things themselves which they believe that government of the council should have done for them, that they have made several contributions to grade their roads, which they were able grade once, through communal effort, adding that the government has not done anything to prove that they feel the plight of the people in the community.
“But I do not know the plans of the government, it is possible that the government has their own challenges too, in terms of development and we have registered landlords association to assist the government where they cannot do anything, because we have been writing letters.
In terms of electricity, we wrote several letters, until we are privileged to now have a transformer.
“Apart from the transformer that we got, all other materials to put it at work are out of stocks till now; we do not even know how to put them in place.
We have made so many contributions, bought wires, now the challenge is how we are going to get the substation materials which we are still making effort to get. What we have now is a transformer without connection lying down in the community for more than eight months.
“I want to appeal to this new administration under Alhaji Abubakar Jibrin, to come to compensation layout IV, and see for themselves the problems we have been facing for years, most especially in the area of road and electricity, and put an end to it.
We believe that this present administration will make a difference, by bringing the long awaited infrastructural development to our community,” he said.
Mr Ibrahim Kabir, another resident of the community, said another major problem is that the community does not have water, that if not for individual drilled borehole, there would not have been water at all in the community; saying that most times people come from far places to fetch water from a single borehole, because of the lack of water in the community.
“The security situation is another big challenge that we do not know what to do. If you look at the periphery of this layout, at night you cannot work freely, because hoodlums from the other side of Kutunku will be parading about and embarrassing people and if you are alone, they will snatch your pulse and we have made endless report to the police, but to no avail.
This compensation layout, the way it is designed, there is supposed to be police post, recreation and health centre, but those things are absent here because of the way the surveyors handled the matter.
“Because of the contractors that the surveyors of brought, they never supervised them, so those areas that were supposed to be for police post, recreation, hospital and schools were not put in place, so that is why we do not really know what to do. We really want the government to come here, property developers should come into the layout and look at what the surveyor has done and map out places for the right infrastructures to be put in place, mostly the police post, to reduce the insecurity problem.
“We pray that they should come and solve the problem of road, we do not need to pay tenement rates and still make contribution to grade our roads, at least grading the roads for easy accessibility, and they should come and remove us from darkness, which we have suffered for too long, and they should give us water, the issue of security, we will try to sort out ourselves.” He said.