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Real estate firms have become quite persuasive in marketing new property developments in Lagos suburbs of Epe and Ikorodu, but some who have bought this message of ‘owning your own house’ in Lagos have got their fingers burnt.
This appears to be the case with a group of people who bought pieces of land from Brickwall Global Investments Limited, a Lagos-based real estate firm, owned by Uche Ahubelem, a real estate practitioner and motivational speaker.
Five persons who bought property from the company have petitioned the Federal High Court, Lagos, seeking to wind up the business so as to liquidate the company’s assets and retrieve over N5.7 million spent on purchasing pieces of land in the company’s Mayflower Estate, at Ikorodu.
“More than two years after these sums were paid, the respondent without cause or justification has refused to give the petitioners possession of the respective parcel of land purchased, or in the alternative, return the purchase price despite several demands to that effect,” they wrote in a petition to the court.
The petitioners include Lawrence and Saffron Imolode, Ebuka Ezeocha, Zephaniah Nwokeji, and Chuka Nwadialo. But apart from them, investigations show that over a dozen others have also been traded excuses rather than real estate.
Nwokeji told BusinessDay on phone that after one Precious Uba, a marketing staff of Brickwall Global Investments visited him at home and sold the property, she had done nothing to ensure that they got their land allocations.
When Uba was contacted, even she sounded helpless. “The company has told them to wait, there is nothing I can do about this situation,” she said on phone.
Nwokeji fears that the same land sold to them of which they had been unable to take possession may have also been sold to others. Uba confirmed that she was selling lands in other areas.
“Everything about this looks like a scam,” Nwokeji said.
Emmanuel Ijakpa, chief operating officer of Brickwall Global Investments, told BusinessDay that the delay in allocating the land to the buyers was due to a massive gully, almost the size of an acre, on the property, which was not noticed when they bought it from the family.
“We want to make sure that the people we bought the land from are involved in this issue, they should bear some losses too, which we have arrived at an agreement and a company has been contacted,” Ijakpa said.
The land in dispute is over 3,200 square meters lying in Mowo Nla village, Ikorodu, in Ikorodu Local Government Area of Lagos State, which belonged to Ifegbuwa Chieftaincy Family.
But the petitioners believe the company is merely shopping for excuses because it carried out its due diligence on the land before buying it.
In any case, Ezeocha, one of the petitioners, refuted the claims, saying he was first told of this gully in 2016 and the company said it was a minor issue that could be fixed before the end of the year.
“It is strange they are giving this as an excuse in 2020, our demand is simple, provide us with the land we paid for or refund our money,” he said.
Findings show that the petitioners are not the only people Brickwall Global Investments has also failed to honour its commitments to. The company’s offices in Festac and Ikeja are filled with a motley mob of disgruntled customers who had paid millions of naira for lands they were never given.
Omotosho Adeleke, a lawyer who signed on to the Brickwall Global Investment’s instalment paying plan for several plots of lands in Ikorodu and after paying over N1.5 million he began to smell a rat.
“I visited the land and discovered nothing had been done as par our agreement. They were supposed to have provided access roads, perimeter fencing and even demarcates plots but nothing had been done,” Adeleke said.
Adeleke decided to stop further payments in 2016, but Brickwall kept urging him to pay. To persuade him to resume paying, the company’s staff took him to a clearing at Ajah, where a bulldozer was clearing a patch of land on which the company had attached its signpost, as his new location. “It was then it became clear that it is a scam, I stopped paying.”
