By Marie-Therese Nanlong, Jos

The Plateau State government has warned developers who are illegally intruding into government property to raise illegal structures to desist as the government of the day would ensure any illegal structures raised without the necessary approval would brought down at the cost of the developers.

This was stressed when government officials on Monday clamped down on yet-to-be-identified persons raising structures on government land situated at the Old Legislative Quarters, Bauchi Ring road, Jos.

The officials including the State Commissioner for Housing and Urban Development, Joshua Laven, the State Commissioner for Information and Communication, Musa Ashoms, the General Manager, Jos Metropolitan Development Board, JMDB, Hart Bankat and others visited the building sites and ordered that work be stopped until the person carrying out the construction work is identified and his approval documents tendered as there is no official record to show who is behind the construction.

Bankat said a notice was given last week for work to be stalled until the right things are done when the land was just being cleared but instead of the person to come forward, the said notice was ignored while massive work is being done in the space of less than four days.

His words, “Nobody is above the law, this administration is not out to witch hunt anybody but for the right things to be done. It is standard practice that before you start any building, building approval has to be given after you have gotten your appropriate titles from the Ministry of Lands and Survey. Our attention was called when this construction work was about to start.

“We sent our men they came in sometime last week and marked for the work to be stopped. We came here with the Commissioner for Housing and Urban Development, Commissioner for Lands and Survey, and Commissioner for Information and Communication, after the Head of Service came to inquire who gave them the mandate. We begged them to stop work only for us to go for a weekend and on coming back, you can see the massive work being done here in just a few days.

“It is no longer business as usual. When we tell you to stop work, we mean stop work so we can verify. There is a greater Jos master plan which had been bastardized, we’re trying to implement that and bring sanity back to it but it’s unfortunate when people think they’re above the law and go ahead to do whatever they want to.

“It’s a crime in the first instance to build without approval. And then when the government identifies your building without approval and tells you to stop, you insist on doing it, it means you’re proving to us that you’re above the law, but I can assure you that we’re using this as a test run. Every single block you see here we’re bringing down and we’re here to pick the people who we’ve told to stop work but they have continued working.

“The full legal process will go on with them, we’re giving the owner just till tomorrow to take off all these blocks and come and take these people out and give us a reason why he is insisting on doing this. If he refuses then I can assure you the full-weight of government will be here to take the structure down tomorrow. This is a government layout, this is a football field. This is the basketball court and this squash court, the Civil Service club. Who would sell public facilities to individuals and then why are they in a hurry to build when we say they should stop?”

Laven added, “This is a government facility, we’ve done our due diligence, it’s still government-owned property. This government is not lawless.
It is time for us to know that no one is above the law. So we have to do the right thing but you can see how disobedient this person could be. We will recover all government property that is hijacked by illegal occupiers…”

Ashoms insisted, “People shouldn’t be in a hurry to deface our city. We’re trying to make our city green and beautiful. So you cannot take over government property and think that there is no ownership. It is not a banana republic. This is Plateau State, this is a warning to everybody who feels he is above the law… So we are using this opportunity to call on people like this who are lawless to understand that there’s a new sheriff in town, when we say stop work, we mean stop work and do the right thing.”