Adamawa Residents Demand Compensation Over Stadium Demolition

(Stadium Demolished. Photo by Daily Post)

Residents of the Kofare/Dundere community in Yola South Local Government Area of Adamawa State, whose buildings have either been demolished or marked for demolition to make way for an ongoing stadium project, have demanded compensation from the state government.

A total of 166 houses and other landed properties are to be cleared to make way for the Yola International Stadium complex currently under construction by the government.

The Chairman of the Kofare/Dundere Community, Mohammed Abdullahi Suleiman, speaking with newsmen in Yola, appealed to the government to compensate all affected residents.

He explained that the landlords had followed due process in acquiring their respective plots, noting that some of them had occupied their properties for as long as 15 years before the current administration issued them a sudden quit notice.

He added that while the government's decision to complete the long-abandoned stadium project was a welcome one, it was costing the community its peace.

Suleiman appealed to the state governor to handle the matter with a human face, arguing that even if building on the contested stadium land was a mistake, the residents did not deserve such harsh treatment from a government they themselves helped bring to power.

For their part, the governor and officials of his administration have repeatedly maintained that the landlords acquired the affected lands illegally and encroached on the area set aside for the stadium project.

The government claims to have notified the affected residents on several occasions of its intention to reclaim all encroached areas.

Government officials, who accused the residents of not taking the matter seriously and ignoring repeated orders to vacate, deployed bulldozers last month to begin the demolition exercise.

An online news platform reports that plans for the stadium project date back to 1986, when Senator David Jang, then a military officer, served as administrator of what was then Gongola State, now Adamawa.

The project stalled for years until the administration of a later governor, Murtala Nyako, who himself failed to complete it before leaving office abruptly in 2014.

The current governor, determined to see the project through, has pushed its completion to about 90 percent, extending construction to portions of the land that previous administrations never reached and therefore did not take the drastic step of evicting the private occupiers now described as encroachers.