By Omeiza Ajayi

ABUJA: Federal Capital Territory FCT Minister, Ezenwo Nyesom Wike has vowed to go ahead with demolitions of shanties and illegal structures in the territory, saying government will not succumb to blackmail by few individuals who would rather that the status quo be maintained.

Wike who had held an emergency security council meeting on Sunday evening had in company of the security chiefs and journalists visited the Ruga community in Wuye District where town planning officials and security personnel had earlier gone on clearance operations.

There were reports that a handful of the squatters had protested alongside a lawyer, but spokesman of the community, Abba Garu conceded that they were illegal squatters and that previous administrations had carried out at least 22 demolitions of the area but the people always returned.

While he noted that the community was a mini-Nigeria as it had people from different tribes, Garu begged the administration for compassion.

In response, Wike asked him to nominate four other members of the community to meet with officials of the administration in order to come up with a humane solution.

He said; “We have had a lot of threats of insecurity in the FCT and the security agencies are working 24 hours to make sure that Abuja is safe.

“They have identified that this area is one of the areas that pose a lot of threats to security agencies. We have the rail line. It’s like a buffer zone and if you allow these kind of people to be here, what it means is that anything can happen to our trains and nobody will take that risk. This is government land and because government has not decided what to do with it, some persons came to stay on it ans some using it as base to commit crimes. But we are humans, we have told them the position of government and also seeing how we can interface more with them so that we can see what we can do for them so that it won’t look as of we are inflicting hardship on them. But the truth of the matter is that no government worth it’s salt will fold its hands and allow this place being occupied by hoodlums. You can imagine the number of person here who we cannot identify. We hear a lot of crimes are committed outside and at the end of the day they come to stay here. How will you know? Government has decided that we are going to go back and look at what we can do but nobody should build anything here again whether temporary or permanent.

“We have also said that no amount of blackmail, intimidation or abuses will stop us from doing our jobs. It doesn’t matter those who go and hire people they tag civil societies or non-civil societies. We are not interested in that. Our interest is to protect lives and property, to safeguard Abuja