Press Release.
The Lagos State chapter of the All Progressives Congress has condemned as greedy, wicked and annoying the illegal use of the military by the Minister of State for Defence, Musliu Obanikoro to stop the mass housing project of Governor Raji Fashola at Ilubirin on the weird claim that the land belongs to the federal government. The party wonders if Obanikoro was recently made a minister to further the well known PDP battle to stifle Lagos and a fifth of Nigeria’s entire population just because Lagos refuse to join the destructive PDP bandwagon.
In a release in Lagos, signed by the Lagos State Interim Publicity Secretary of the APC, Joe Igbokwe, the party said that the claim by Obinokoro that the federal government owns the same land reclaimed recently by the Lagos State government is not only ridiculous but entirely outlandish. It warns Obanikoro that Lagos is not a state that could be intimidated by such primitive tactics as he is using and warns him to steer clear of Lagos land.
“We are yet to understand the basis upon which Obanikoro is claiming a part of Lagos, reclaimed by the Lagos State government just recently as belonging to the federal government yet his recent obnoxious use of the military to stop a mass housing scheme being constructed by the Lagos State government. To us, this is the same illegal perpetration of crude means to overwhelm and annex Lagos, since the state refused to sign up to the decadent politics of the PDP and all its decrementing values. We see Obanikoro’s effort as just another greedy, illegal land grab that will fail as there exists no basis or grounds for such reckless impunity.
“Lagos APC is now being made to understand that Obanikoro’s appointment as minister was to create enough crisis in Lagos, engage in a battle of forts with the legally constituted authority and create the same enabling environment to distract, obstruct the globally acclaimed feat made by the Lagos State government in all spheres of governance while Obanikoro’s PDP leads Nigeria to a certain guillotine by each passing day. We are convinced that the perpetration of illegality and employment of brute force to mount an illegal quest for territory in Lagos has become such an attractive fad with successive PDP governments and we assure Obanikoro and his masters that just as previous efforts failed, this one will certainly fail. We are aware that what Obanikoro is doing today has no legal basis or backing but like an average PDP man, he believes that a sophisticated state like Lagos could be overwhelmed by the use of brute force and misuse of the military. Lagos will certainly show him that such tactics have no place in a democracy, even with all the misuse the PDP has subjected it to.
“It is so annoying that Obanikoro targets the provision of mass housing for Lagosians in the absence of such provision by the government he serves in Abuja. To now act as a dog in a manger and seek to frustrate the well lauded efforts of Lagos to provide cheap housing to Lagosians tantamount to sheer wickedness, of the type that had marked the relationship between the PDP government and Nigerians these past fifteen years.
“We are using this medium to alert Nigerians, especially the members of the National Assembly of this obnoxious act. We want to draw the attention of the military high command to the use of the military to perpetrate an illegal claim over Lagos land. We want the military high command to call Obanikoro to order and prevent such misuse of the military as it will portend grave danger to the image of the military. We call on the National Assembly to wade in and call this errant minister to order before he provokes a crisis that will seriously spill over.
“We warn Obanikoro and whoever he represents in his present obnoxious quest to annex Lagos lands to steer clear of this act for Lagos will not sit idly by and watch such annoying perpetration of illegality against them by an overzealous agent of backwardness. We urge all Lagosians to rise up and condemn this illegal act as it portends grave danger to the interests of Lagosians.”
