Ladeji: Why LASG Should Allocate Investors’ Land at Oko Orisan Waterfront scheme

Mr Charles Olushola Ladeji, a Nigerian banker based in the United Kingdom, and his siblings invested in the Lagos State promoted Oko Orisan Waterfront Residential Scheme in 2010, some 12 years ago. Unfortunately, he and other investors in the scheme have not been physically allocated their plots. Ladeji recently wrote an open letter to the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, for his intervention in the matter. In this interview, he shed more light on the situation. Excerpts:

Please tell us about yourself sir?

My name is Charles Olushola Ladeji, a Nigerian professional in the banking industry in the United Kingdom. I have lived abroad for the past 35 years with my family. My desire is to return to live in Nigeria at some point in the near future.

You recently wrote an open letter to the governor of Lagos State on the government’s failure to allocate physical land to you and other buyers in the Oko Orisan Waterfront Residential Scheme, 12 years after completing payment. Tell us more about this?

That is correct. My siblings and I made the decision in 2010 to purchase a piece of land each at the Oko Orisan Waterfront Residential Scheme in Lekki area of Lagos State. We were introduced to the scheme by a family friend who assured us that being a government scheme, it was a safe and sound investment, which made sense to us. At that time, we were looking to buy land in Nigeria to help realise our future plans. We therefore each paid just over N3 million to buy plots at the scheme.

What evidence do you have to show that you truly bought land at the Oko Orisan Waterfront Residential Scheme?

We were all issued with allocation letters, and receipts. We all have original copies of the letters. The letters were issued by the Lagos State government, the Governor’s Office and were dated 4 November 2010. I have visited the state offices in Alausa, Ikeja, on several occasions to inquire about progress on the physical hand over of the land and it has never been in dispute that we purchased those lands and the paper allocations rightly made.

Do you know if there are buyers who have got physical allocation at the scheme?

I don’t know that there are buyers that have got physical allocations. I don’t believe there are any. The reason I say that is that I drove down to the proposed location of the scheme, after the Dangote Refinery, and the place is all bush. I was provided with information on the location by the officials at Alausa, which was verified by the locals in that area when I arrived there.   There was absolutely no access road to the land. It has not been physically handed to anyone as of October 2021 when I visited.

Could it be that the scheme was a fraud?

To the best of my knowledge, the state government did not intend for the scheme to be a fraud. I say that because we were issued with official letters of purchase and receipts by the Lagos State government, and I have visited Alausa on several occasions and I have been told that the state government was working on the physical allocation of the land. I have met with various officials of government in Alausa, so I don’t think the original intention was for it to be fraudulent but because of what has happened over the years, it is now taking on an appearance of a scheme that lacked credibility. The whole idea is starting to look like the government no longer have the intention to allocate the land. And if they have taken money and have no intention of allocating land, then the result is that one could come to the conclusion that its action is questionable, and at the very least deceptive. It would be difficult for the government to fault that conclusion. What makes this of grave concern is that the state government has continued to launch other schemes, when they are fully aware that they have failed to physically hand over land that were previously purchased from them.  It is for people to form their own opinion, but this conduct, in my own view, is immoral, and is lacking integrity.

In your open letter you mentioned the poor treatment meted out to buyers of the Oko Orisan Waterfront Residential Scheme by Lagos State government officials responsible for the scheme. Can you talk more on this?

It is mainly down to the fact that there was a lack of care. On each occasion that I visited government offices at Alausa, all I was given were excuses after excuses. On each occasion, I got the impression that the officials were helpless, that they were only repeating instructions passed down from higher quarters. So, as an institution, the government, along with the civil service couldn’t care less about the plight of people. For me that demonstrated poor treatment.

Why has it taken you this long to seek the governor’s intervention?

The governor is not someone that one could easily engage with. As an individual, one could not easily get the attention of the governor on this kind of matter. Past and present governors will probably go around claiming credit that they have these schemes in Lagos State, but you need to be at the receiving end of it to know the state government claims are wrong.  The governors may have been misled by their advisers and the civil servants involved that the lands have been handed over to their owners.  We are now at a stage that the current governor needs to step in and resolve the issue. The governor needs to take control, otherwise it is Sanwo-Olu’s credibility that is currently at stake.

Unlike the governor, the courts are easily accessible. So why haven’t you approached the courts?

The courts are the last resort. Approaching the court has its own implications. We should not be promoting a society where every grievance is resolved through the courts. In any case, we know that it can be a very long process going through the Nigerian courts, and as they say justice delayed is justice denied! Also, by going to the court one gets a sense that one is throwing good money after bad so that one could end up losing even more money. Where things are now, it is unclear what the intentions of the state government are. The government has a responsibility to do what is right without having to be taken to court.

Have you tried to seek the intervention of the Lagos State Assembly on this matter?

I haven’t, and it’s for the same reasons I gave for why I have not sought a redress in the courts. I paid for a piece of land that the government promoted, citizens used their money to purchase land from the government and have not received what they paid for. Dreams have been shattered, lives have been destroyed, hopes lost, and people cheated as a result. I don’t think it is unreasonable of us to ask for what is ours without resorting to any of these things. We Nigerians seem to have lost the sense of our rights; our expectations of government have been drastically eroded that we don’t even think of getting anywhere without resorting to these things. It is a massive problem in our society, and it is shameful. If the common Nigerian see how things are done in some other African countries, they will feel sorry for themselves.

What do you have to say to the governor, the state assembly, and other well-meaning Lagosians who can help you get closure on this matter?     

Firstly, the people that are responsible for decision making should put themselves in the shoes of those that have used their hard earned money to buy land, ordinary Nigerians. Because someone that would purchase land in this type of scheme is not someone of great means with tonnes of money.

So, I say to the government, please do what is right. It does not help the reputation of the government; it does not help people to have  no belief in the system. And at the end, we all lose. If someone like myself that has used his hard-earned money to buy a piece of land in a scheme in the hope of building a residential property to retire and live in is unable to do that then it means that many more Nigerians are potentially affected by what the government has done. Such actions, of collecting money from someone and failing to provide what they paid for, will scare investors from the state, and that is looking at it from commercial perspectives too. The government does not even appear to care about the message it is sending out to Nigerian and foreign investors.  For example, I know of a few Nigerians living abroad that are investing in their own retirement homes outside Nigeria when ordinarily they would have preferred to be in Nigeria.   

It was Babatunde Raji Fashola that was in government when we purchased the land. And three administrations after, we have not had a resolution. There is a contract in place, an agreement between the government and allottees, and the government should fulfil its side of the contract, no matter what it may cost the government now. Otherwise, trust and confidence will be lost in the Lagos State government. And when such happens, that is what leads to disobedience and disturbances in society.

The Lagos state government should restore the faith of the people by allocating this land and any other scheme it has yet to conclude on. What the government should do is to allocate the land that money has been collected for. The issue of refund of money to investors in the scheme, as some would suggest, shouldn’t even be considered. The money that was used to purchase the land 12 years ago would not get you land of the same VALUE today. We all know that!  

Even the talk about government allocating land to investors in the scheme somewhere else shouldn’t arise. Will the alternative place have the same value and attraction as the Oko Orisan Waterfront?