Mpape: FCTA continues war against illegal structures, remove markets

The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has Wednesday, continued with its ongoing war against criminalities at Mpape community, where several illegal markets, warehouses and scrap dumps were removed.

Chairman , FCT Ministerial Committee on City Sanitation, Ikharo Attah, while fielding questions from journalists in Mpape, in Abuja, said the demolition in Mpape will enter the 2nd quarter of next year or untill when the administration is sure that the residents are ready to comply with Town planning Acts.

According to Attah: “Today work is a little massive than we thought because we removed some massive structures, that are on the roadside, no allocation,no building plan, no papers at all and they harbour the pantakers and criminals that led to the blocking of the road.

“Knowing that The structures are blocking the road and knowing they don’t have document we had to come in here. The road market at Mpape has been a problem, you saw what we saw this morning , the place was impassible, we have notified the Bwari Area Council Chairman, Mr John Gabaya, and he promised that they are going to rebuild the market and make it modern .

“We told him that the market cannot be by the roadside, the market must give way because it was impeding the free flow of traffic and more than 85% of the market have been converted to residential shanties, and that contravenes the urban and regional planning Acts, so we came in here to actually remove them and you can see the work we did today and Mpape is looking cleaner everyday.

” From the way we are seeing Mpape, it may enter 2nd quaters of next year. Once we clear Mpape, we see them coming back so we keep on coming back until when we are sure that Mpape residents are ready to comply with Town planning Act and Land use Act”.

On security and resistant, he said there was no resistant and there were only one or two people that were arrested and they were suspected to be high on drugs and they would be profiled by the security agencies.

On the other side where indigenes are staying, he said, “The other side is the organic settlement but we have cleared the roadside, we had to clear the obstruction on the roadside. They are suppose to take 20 meters from both side but we had to reduce it to 7 meters pending the time they the indigenes are resettle or relocated or reintegrated into the FCT”.

The Commander , Joint Security Team, ASP Idowu Azeez, said only 2 or 3 people were arrested, someone that was trying to incite people and the other that was caught with dangerous weapon and has been taken to the station for profiling.

Secretary FCT, Command and Control, Peter Olumuji, said where the team cleared were where there were security threats, because some of the residents complained to them that their children were being raped.