transfer the vacant, undeveloped plots to their pension funds. The more criminally minded agencies
joined the land speculation business by attempting to go into ‘joint ventures’ with private
organizations to develop the land, often outside their core mandates and enabling statutes. We took the
decision to reject all these attempts and comply with the letter and spirit of monetization – that no
government agencies should directly or by proxy develop land other than what they needed for their
administration, which will be funded via appropriation acts and no other way.
‘Functus Officio,’ - the Great Land Grab
It is now history that these detailed explanations submitted to President Yar’Adua neither made any
difference nor stopped him and my dear friend and successor as FCT minister, Dr. Aliyu Modibbo,
from initiating, guiding and motivating the Sodangi Senate Committee to probe my tenure under the
pretext that they were responding to petitions received on the administration of the FCT from 1999 to
2007. Even a fool knew I was the target of the investigation, and the proceedings clearly
demonstrated it. For instance, when my predecessor, Abba Gana, was asked by a senator whether he
had approved the allocation of any plots of land to his family members, he answered in the
affirmative, and added that “charity begins at home!” The senators laughed and let the moment pass.
At the end of their proceedings, however, the one ‘scandal’ contrived against me was the fact that I
had approved the allocation of a plot of land for my wife. This same action admitted to being taken by
FCT minister Abba Gana elicited a totally different reaction for the obvious reasons that I was a
target and he was not.
Some of the members of the Senate Committee, like the chairman, Sodangi, Smart Adeyemi and
Ikechukwu Obiora, came into the assignment with conflict of interest and some personal grudges
against me and decisions of FCTA during my tenure, and contrary to the Standing Rules of the Senate,
neither declared the conflict nor disqualified themselves from participating in the proceedings. These
are matters still before the courts, but I will provide documents here[67] that I hope would speak to
the various instances of misconduct of selected senators, without being ‘ sub-judice’.
Part of what we inherited in the FCT was a huge backlog of applications for land, which had not
received allocations. I was determined not only to clear the backlog but also to reduce the waiting
time for allocation of land to between three and six months from the date of filing a complete
application and payment of fees. We therefore not only got all the nearly 85,000 un-attended
applications updated, but inaugurated a task force on October 30 2006, headed by Baba Kura Umar,
then an assistant director at AGIS, to recommend the allocation of plots in the FCC and satellite
towns to all the qualified applicants. Of the backlog, we concluded that about 22,000 of such
applicants qualified for land allocation, and we were determined to try to clear the backlog by the
end of my tenure, on May 29, 2007. Until the inauguration of the task force, only about 8,000 plots had
been allocated in my entire time as minister. The task force worked round the clock putting up
recommendations for my approval up until the eve of our departure from office. While trying hard to
clear the historical backlog, we did not realize we were setting up ourselves for misrepresentation by
the professional mischief-makers who succeeded us in office. As an example, I was accused by my
successor of allocating over 3,000 plots in the month of May 2007. He conveniently forgot that, since
the task force began submitting recommendations to me in November 2006, I was approving a similar
number every single month to May 2007.
The goal of my successor and the Senate Committee was to find a way to invalidate these allocations
so that they could re-allocate to the senators, new FCTA leadership, chosen friends, family and
companies that they owned or controlled. Since the mere accusation of last minute allocations was
not enough to render the exercise of ministerial responsibility illegal, FCT minister Modibbo and
Senator Sodangi had to create a huge lie – that the Federal Executive Council of which my successor
and I were members till the 29th of May 2007 had been dissolved on the 15th of May 2007. This was
both an outright and disingenuous lie and a perjury to boot, for several reasons. First, such a
significant event happening would certainly have been reported in the media on the 16th of May 2007.
No newspaper or web-based medium reported such. Secondly, the Cabinet met on 23rd May 2007
with my successor, Dr. Aliyu Modibbo, then minister of commerce and industry, in attendance.
Finally, Cabinet meetings are a matter of public record and only morally-flexible people would lie so
blatantly and attempt to wish away such records.
All these did not stop my successor and Sodangi misleading the Senate Committee, the Senate as a
body and the whole country by declaring that: (1) The FEC was dissolved on May 15th 2007. (2)
Nasir El-Rufai became “functus officio” [68]and therefore ceased to be Minister of FCT on 15th
May 2007. (3) All the allocations made during the period were therefore void. The shameless
contradiction in all these claims was that other actions that I took during the same period, including
signing letters of offer for sale of houses to a couple of ministers and other officials in the Yar’Adua
administration were, conveniently, not deemed invalidated.
In Appendix 6 of this book, I have provided the attendance list for the cabinet meeting of Wednesday,
23rd May 2007. The cabinet met again on Monday, May 28th 2007 with no agenda other than to adopt
the conclusions of this meeting. We then had a valedictory photograph and video session widely
reported in the print and electronic media. My successor, Dr. Aliyu Modibbo, was at that meeting as
well. In addition, Yayale Ahmed, Major-General Abdullahi Sarki Mukhtar, General Abdullahi
Mohammed, Dr. Sayyadi Abba Ruma, Alhaji Ikra Aliyu Bilbis, and Dr. Hassan Mohammed Lawal,
all part of the Yar’Adua cabinet, were also in attendance, but miraculously and conveniently forgot
this post-May 15th meeting ever taking place, while the falsehood of “functus officio” was being
bandied around as gospel truth.
This contrived lie was however convenient because it enabled the FCT ministers that succeeded me
to unlawfully “revoke” over 3,000 plots already allocated to qualified Nigerians and ‘re-allocate’
them to Sodangi and others[69] based on the falsely procured Senate Resolution. Under the
leadership of Adamu Aliero, officials of the FCT administration quietly drew attention to the minutes
of the last meeting of the FCT Executive Committee dated May 22nd 2007 to debunk Modibbo-
Sodangi’s fictitious “functus officio” . Aliero wanted to allocate some of the plots too in like manner
and was therefore reluctant to accept the truth.[70] He chose to write the Cabinet Secretariat in the
office of the SGF asking for clarification on the purported dissolution of the Cabinet on the 15th of
May 2007. The response from the SGF’s office was unequivocal – the Cabinet met on Wednesday
May 23nd in its final plenary session, was never dissolved at any time, and met for the last time on
Monday, May 28th 2007.
This was not the reply any of
my successors-in-office wanted, so they ignored it and proceeded with
the unlawful revocation and re-allocation of the plots of thousands of innocent citizens, while giving
the impression that the allocations were ‘hurriedly made’ to my fronts, friends and family members.
Many cases are in the courts challenging (and successfully reversing) these unlawful actions. What
continued to baffle me when these lies about ‘cabinet dissolution’ were being propagated was not the
shamelessness of those that seek to benefit from them, but the silence of some other Obasanjo
ministers that were re-appointed to the cabinet by Yar’Adua, and even Obasanjo as well about a
clear and simple issue. A one-line statement from him that he never dissolved the cabinet in his
second term would have ended the falsehood and the injustice to thousands of land allottees that
depended on it. However, it was clear though at that point in time, it was everyone for himself and no
one for truth or country. What is sad about this is that those that fabricated these lies to acquire
undeserved ability to tamper with the property rights of others, or kept silent while falsehood was
allowed to prevail over truth somehow believe they were “smarter” than the rest of us, and that
societies ran that way can make progress. They are surprised that life quite does not work that way.
Correlation between Policies and Outcomes
Our principal goal as FCT Administration was to accelerate the orderly development of Abuja by
eliminating land racketeering, reducing rent-seeking and land speculation, and giving genuine
developers easier access to land. This we did by ensuring that over 27,000 out of 30,000 verified and
valid applicants were allocated land during our tenure. We revoked the titles of persons who
considered themselves sacred cows. We did not care about how they felt because the public interest
of Abuja and the country overrode that of a few greedy and self-serving individuals.
We know that they will neither forgive us nor forget until they extracted their pound of flesh. We have
no defense against their wealth, power and capacity for mischief except the truth. We are ready to
face them any time with facts, figures and documents. We have nothing to hide and no one to fear. As
human beings, we must have made mistakes. However, to suggest that anything we did was driven by
any motive other than public interest is patent injustice to us. I insist always that those that attribute
any such motives to us should do so with facts, figures and documents not innuendo, rumour and
repeated character assassination.
The correlation between our policies and development outcomes are clear. I invite the reader to
review the table below to see the relative efficacy of our decisions and actions. Between 1980 and
2005, nearly 19,000 plots were allocated to private individuals and organizations in FCT. Slightly
over 11,000 were developed by 2005 - an average of less than 500 plots developed per annum. In
comparison, during the second half of my tenure, when our land reforms began to take full effect, over
2,000 plots were developed within less than 2 years. This created a construction boom in Abuja with
jobs and economic opportunities for many more than the few greedy land speculators of the past. This
is how we measured the efficacy of our policies, decisions and actions.
TABLE 1: PLOTS DEVELOPMENT IN FCT
S/no
District
Plot
Built
Under
Fence
1980-
2005
- ConstructionWork
2005
2007
Only
Completed
1
CBD
720
192
29
86
15
2
GARKI
1328
1240
30
21
9
3
WUSE
2671
2660
15
6
3
4
GARKI II
940
735
81
51
6
5
ASOKORO
2769
1900
192
88
25
6
MAITAMA
2260
1998
113
107
15
7
WUSE II
1598
1460
65
44
11
8
GUDU
750
450
39
23
15
9
DURUMI
850
10
37
32
6
10
WUYE
866
185
15
14
4
11
JABI
620
185
116
145
50
12
UTAKO
750
210
86
113
30
13
MABUSHI
850
28
16
35
13
14
KATAMPE
1100
10
10
6
11
15
SECTOR CENTRE70
Nil
2
3
2
C
16
SECTOR CENTRE77
7
2
4
4
B
17
SECTOR CENTRE140
Nil
Nil
2
8
A
18
SECTOR CENTRE158
5
6
15
20
D
19
IDU - INDUSTRIAL 440
33
5
35
10
20
NEIGHBOURHOOD21
corner-
2
6
1
CENTRES
shops
TOTAL
18,978
11,308
1059
1036
558
We institutionalized AGIS as the sole custodian of geo-spatial data in the FCT, and erected the AGIS
headquarters building at the southern tip of the Cultural Zone – near the FCDA offices to house the
operations of the organization. We submitted legislation to the National Assembly to convert AGIS
from an administrative entity in the minister’s office into an independent statutory agency, but the
legislation was never passed until we left office. Related legislation like the Abuja Property Tax Bill,
Abuja Board of Internal Revenue Bill, and another to create the FCT Public Service Commission
were similarly and sadly ignored by the legislature. I hope those that care about Abuja’s sustainable
governance would dust some of these and move on with getting them enacted.
One other development that saddens me is that all the reforms we carefully thought through and
implemented in land administration have unravelled under the repeated assault of our successors-in-
<
br /> office. Incompetent cronies were appointed to replace competent, well-trained AGIS management,
former staff that were laid off for involvement in land racketeering were reinstated, and all manner of
well-connected people were imported to enjoy the newly created gravy train in AGIS. The careful
and limited access to land data we had put in place was liberalized in 2008. The audit trail
capabilities built into the system that enabled tracking of those that altered land records have been
removed. The results are disastrous. Today, double allocation has returned even more easily because
it is simpler to alter digital records without trace than create fake paper files. Moreover, those that
took these destructive decisions thought they were simply undoing our legacy, hoping that they will
unearth some smoking gun of corruption in land allocation - but found there was nothing. It is only the
FCT and its residents that may have been the worse for it, not El-Rufai and his team.
Chapter Ten
Sale of Government Houses in Abuja
The acquisition of a home is usually the single largest investment
made by most people in their lifetime and home ownership is what
catapults people to middle class status. Owning a home also
presents an opportunity to alienate it and raise money for
investment in other real and financial assets, thereby leveraging
societal resources and encouraging entrepreneurship.
- Housing for All? – El-Rufai on Friday, ThisDay, September 30,2011
One of the cornerstones of the economic reform programme of the Obasanjo administration in 2003
was the restructuring, reorganisation and reorientation of the Federal Public Service from a bloated,
expensive and inefficient bureaucracy (67% of the federal budget was spent on recurrent expenditure)
to a leaner, more professional, and efficient service delivery organism. A key component of these
reforms was the restructuring and monetisation of public sector personnel benefits and entitlements to
eliminate waste and the opportunities for abuse.
Accordingly, two of the largest items identified for elimination were the direct provision of
individual transportation and housing, particularly as these had proven to be the most wasteful,
The Accidental Public Servant Page 40
