About 100 senior civil servants in the employment of Rivers State may be thrown out on the streets if the allegation of an impending mass eviction of government workers occupying government-owned buildings in two GRAs in Port Harcourt turns out to be true.
The occupants of the government-owned buildings have cried out over what they fear is a plot to push them out and probably hand over about 100 houses and parcels of land in 10 streets in the two Government Reserved Areas (GRAs) to private owners.
A plot of land in the GRA is over N300m, according to estate agents and going price calculations. This may mean that should the state government succeed in evicting the occupants, it would have about N30bn worth of land available to sell or for whatever other purpose.
The threatened senior civil servants, who were allocated the apartments in writing, claimed that already, a verbal quit order has been issued to them from the state governor through the Head of Service.
They complained bitterly about the absence of a written notice for houses they got through allocation papers. They said it was their ranks as senior civil servants that entitled them to those houses, as has been the tradition over the decades.
The affected persons, who spoke to newsmen on condition of anonymity for fear of victimisation, said the tradition is that when an occupant retires or resigns, he/she relinquishes the building (compound) to the state government.
It was gathered that as a civil servant of Rivers State, one can apply and be allocated government quarters, if one qualified. Thus, the occupants have the authorised allocation from the office of the Head of Service (HoS).
Some of the occupants said some of these houses have not been maintained by the state government for years, and so, the occupants have been the ones maintaining them.
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The houses in question were built in the colonial times, it was further gathered. Once in a while, the government would snap up one or two buildings and rebuild to suit an official purpose and use as such. Civil servants displaced in such situations, it was gathered, were always given a new place or were compensated.
BusinessDay gathered that in July 2021, the HoS, Rufus Godwin, called all occupants for a crucial meeting where he asked them to go and give their houses a face-lift. They said most of them complied by raising urgent funds to repair the buildings to appease the government.
On Tuesday, August 17, 2021, however, the HoS through the Head of Housing again allegedly sent out text messages inviting all the occupants on a number of streets, including Abana, Ernest Ikoli, Eleme, Akassa, Isaac Boro, Herbert Macaulay, and Wokekoro, all in the Old GRA, as well as Tombia Street, Opobo Crescent, and Emeyal Street in New GRA, to an urgent meeting.
At the meeting, it was gathered, the HoS conveyed what he termed the order from the state governor for all occupants of the buildings in the mentioned streets in the two GRAs to vacate within a month.
Some of the affected occupants said they could understand if the government said the houses were not befitting of a city undergoing urban renewal.
They are, however, worried that they could not extract any commitment to return to their houses if the government were to rebuild or repair them as, according to them, the HoS would not commit to such on behalf of the governor. Most of the buildings are occupied by families, each household with an average of five occupants, meaning that up to 500 citizens could be thrown into the streets.
Several efforts by this reporter over a two-week period to find out the exact situation of things from the concerned Rivers State government authorities met a brick wall. Text messages sent to the Head of Service came back without result, while a letter routed through the Commissioner of Information after an additional one-week wait did not get any response as at the time of filing this story. Promises made by the office of the Commissioner of Information to get responses to newsmen were not kept either.
Meanwhile, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and some opposition activists have shown interest in the developing scenario.
A Port Harcourt-based rights group, Peoples Rights Protection Initiative (PRPI), said it has taken up the fight and urged the affected workers to resist the order. Its convener, Chris Finebone, one-time publicity secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), said in a statement that the action of the Rivers State Government was totally unacceptable and cruel.
“With 22 months to the end of its lifespan, the Wike administration has revived its plan to eject civil servants from government buildings and quarters in the GRAs to pave the way to sharing those buildings amongst the administration’s top politicians,” Finebone alleged in the statement.
“It would be recalled that about two years ago, the Wike government had activated the process of quitting civil servants from government quarters in the GRAs, but backed down in the face of massive resistance from the civil servants and the public. It is believed that the present attempt is expected to be prosecuted to its logical conclusion since the politicians have become desperate to share those properties as the administration winds down in office,” he said.
He said several plots of land and buildings in Old GRA, Rumuprikom, GRA Phase 1 and 2 were disappearing from the control of ordinary people and that a top political leader was believed to be the one acquiring them.
Finebone urged civil servants to stand up to the decision of those who are hiding behind the state government to push out civil servants from government quarters.
“At this point, the reasonable thing to do is for the civil servants presently occupying such property to resist the directive and the attempt to eject them with every opportunity availed by law,” he said.
