SaharaReporters learnt that the residents were evicted from their homes to give way to a private estate.
Hundreds of residents of Nchatancha Nike community in the Enugu East Local Government Area of Enugu State have staged a peaceful protest against the eviction of many residents by Governor Peter Mbah's administration.
SaharaReporters learnt that the residents were evicted from their homes to give way to a private estate.
SaharaReporters gathered that the eviction took place on February 17, 2024, at Nchatancha Nike.
A video of the protest seen by SaharaReporters on Thursday shows hundreds of residents marching through the streets of the community with placards.
Some of them are heard chanting, "Governor Peter Mbah, don't expel us from ancestry homes. We cannot be refuge in our land."
The protesting residents said in the video that the community had given Governor Mbah and his administration 5,000 plots of land measuring about 445 hectares of land to do whatever project he wanted to do and leave their residential houses which they built out of personal struggle.
Addressing journalists, the leader of the protesters, whom SaharaReporters gathered had been arrested by the Enugu State Commissioner of Police, Kanayo Uzuegbu, on the orders of the governor, decried that over 100 residents of the community had their houses marked and issued seven days’ eviction notices.
According to him, that was besides the “massive destruction of their farm crops running into thousands of hectares of land”.
He accused Governor Mbah and his administration of planning to starve the people of his community. He added that no family in Nchatancha Nike had received any form of palliative despite the billions the Nigerian government had given to the Enugu State government.
According to him, the primary concern of the administration is to destroy all cassava farms.
He said, "The problem why my community is protesting today is because the government has forcefully taken over 80 percent of the land of the community to build a private estate. The community has even agreed to give them 245 hectares of land to use for his so-called new Enugu city. We told them that if it is not enough, they should collect from other communities but they refused.
"The government wants to push us out of our community and we don't know where they want us to go. So, that is why my community is protesting. The government has started demolition, today, the 17th of February 2024, about 50 caterpillars are there demolishing our community - both people's houses and farm crops with the famine going on in the country.
"The government cannot drive us out of our community. Where do we go? We are calling on the Catholic Church and elder statesmen in Enugu state to talk to Governor Peter Mbah to stop the eviction. Probably he may not be aware of the destruction of our community, Nchatancha Nike," he decried.
According to the statement, the clarification was made by the Secretary to Enugu State State Government, Prof. Chidiebere Onyia, during a site visit at Nchatancha Nike where a bulldozer was allegedly attacked.
He reportedly vowed that the government would not be deterred in its determination to actualise the first phase of the new city in 24 months as already agreed with the China Communication Construction Company (CCCC) in October.
He said that the governor, who already had a series of conversations and buy-in of the communities ahead and in the course of the project had ordered the contractors to begin a 24-hour construction work.
Onyia was quoted to have said: “What we have discovered was that a few of community members, in noticing how bullish the governor is in building this New Enugu City, embarked on selling the lands to unsuspecting individuals, knowing that those buyers, not them, will now have to contend with the government.
“But I think we need to step back and answer the questions on when this process started. The first acquisition process started long before this government came. People have been served the notice many years ago that there would be a day like this when a government would decide that it is now time to actualise the promise to build a new city.
“But in doing that, what the governor decided would happen first is to clear the first 1,000 hectares. There are no homes here, as you can see. A few of the marked items you saw at the entrance belong to federal institutions.
“To make sure that no one was left without proper compensation, the governor constituted the Inter-Ministerial Committee, which I chair. We have also put out an announcement. So far, nobody has submitted anything because we are not even at that stage of demolishing anything yet. If you look around, all you see are farmlands. There is no building here, just a bush.”