….you
have a Minister or Permanent Secretary who has mansions in Maitama,
Asokoro, Aso Drive, Within the precincts of Aso Villa, Ministers Hill,
Jabi and Utako and now the real folly, the same Minister or Permanent
Secretary maintains a permanent suite at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel.
This is a circle and it has been going on since Abuja was created and
crazy money gets thrown at people as soon as they assume office.
Let me state from the get go that I love Abuja. The city has been
kind to me and of all the places I have visited and lived in, Abuja will
always be home for me. I first moved to Abuja in 1999 and had cause to
‘step aside’ in 2003 to take up political appointment in Abia State.
After working for 8 years straight in Abia State, I returned to Abuja in
2012. It is worthy of note that for the 8 years I was working in Abia
State, I frequented Abuja almost on a weekly basis and it was
inconceivable that a month would go by without me coming to Abuja. I
always had a car parked in Abuja and I considered Abuja home.
That been said, let me delve into my treatise for the day which is an
attempt to explain the story behind the many abandoned mansions in
Abuja and the high cost of properties in Abuja. It will serve as a guide
to those who are conducting a study on Abuja while also serving as an
explanatory note to those who have never quite understood certain
phenomena in Abuja.
And on that note, let us begin.
As soon as politicians resume elective or appointive offices in
Abuja, they are exposed to all manner of schemes and deals which ensure a
steady flow of illicit cash that would make a puritan see received
wisdom. The most religious of them all will balk at the sheer volume of
money that is available to them for the taking and apparently without
any consequence with criminal minded civil servants marshalling a
convincing argument on the litany of examples of their predecessors who
partook in the same scheme and are now living large and enjoying their
loot. Pronto, our appointee signs up for the deal and the money starts
rolling in.
You see, the amount of money we are talking about is difficult to
just have lying around so the next thing is that they start seeking
avenues of diversifying the steady inflow of cash. The easiest means of
offloading excess cash in Abuja is via property acquisition. In Abuja,
houses are sold for a minimum of N500 Million within the city centre.
The more common price range is between N800 Million and N1.3 Billion.
When these people are in government, they buy up these houses not
because they need them but because they are seeking avenues of
diversifying loose cash. These same people, if you go to their accounts,
you will not see more than Three Million Naira. That is how they play
smart. They seldom buy the properties in their names. It is in the names
of proxies, fronts and shell companies. They used to buy properties in
the names of their children but that racket has been busted by EFCC and
ICPC so they go for names that have absolutely no link whatsoever to
them. Note that these scheme backfire sometimes. The proxies and fronts
used in acquiring the properties sometimes become greedy and seek the
conversion of those properties as everything is in their name. This
often leads to protracted issues that ensure that the house remains
uninhabited.
Soon after our appointee or senior civil servant leaves office, he
runs out of liquid cash as the source has dried up yet he maintains the
first class lifestyle he was used to while in office. The next option is
to start selling all those properties they acquired while they held
office so you see plenty ‘For Sale’ signs hung on numerous beautiful
mansions all over Abuja. They start by trying to make a profit from the
price at which they purchased it. Then after 3 months, when nobody is
interested, they drop the price to the price at which they bought the
house and after another 3 months of no concrete offer, they drop the
price further thus, the house will be on the market for years. Smart
property speculators have made a huge killing out of goading these
has-beens on until they end up selling the property in question for a
fraction of what they bought it for when the pangs of poverty bites
them. The property agent will in-turn sell the same property at premium
value to yet another appointee who just started seeing liquid cash and
is in need of properties to buy. It’s a racket. A con within a con and
the streets in Abuja are mean.
Oh. Did I mention that they never actually fully reside in these
houses? They also do not rent them out because you see, the motivation
was never about money. On the contrary, they are outlets for excess
liquidity. They are invariably fully furnished guest houses that oga
visits once in three months, struts around the premises and zooms off.
Sometimes, the libidinous ones among them camp girls in these houses and
visit them occasionally. Other times, they let out just the Boys
Quarters of the House to create a semblance of life and habitation. They
have 4 or 5 other such houses and they cannot live in all of them at
the same time can they?
Thus, you have a Minister or Permanent Secretary who has mansions in
Maitama, Asokoro, Aso Drive, Within the precincts of Aso Villa,
Ministers Hill, Jabi and Utako and now the real folly, the same Minister
or Permanent Secretary maintains a permanent suite at the Transcorp
Hilton Hotel. This is a circle and it has been going on since Abuja was
created and crazy money gets thrown at people as soon as they assume
office.
Let me not forget to add that sometimes, these people die without
anybody in their family knowing that they own these properties. Remember
that they were not purchased in the names of any members of their
families. They were purchased in fictitious names so when they die of
heart attack, stroke or any other ailment, nobody knows that these are
their properties.
Another reason for abandonment of properties in Abuja is that the
properties are the estates of wealthy men who die and the families they
leave behind commence an epic squabble over their estates. The matter
goes to court and a court slams a restraining order on everybody. For
the next 10 years, nobody has the right to access the properties as they
are still under contention so the beautiful houses lie in waste.
Yet again, the properties may have been collaterals used in accessing
credit facilities from banks and other lenders and upon the
non-performance those loans, court cases are instituted for the takeover
of the properties and legal brickbats ensue and for the duration of the
struggle, the property is inaccessible.
Most ironically, during the pendency of this state of affairs, street
urchins and some dare-devil smart alecs somehow move into these houses
and assume residency. It seems that there exists a cartel in the
property world that specializes in monitoring these mansions to gauge
traffic. Once they ascertain that there has not been any activity on the
property in 6 months, they move in and take up residency. Sometimes, it
is done clandestinely, other times, in full view. Depending on the
circumstances of the abandonment, they maintain occupancy sometimes for
years on end and even graduate to renting out portions of the house to
suspecting and unsuspecting tenants!
The crazy value of properties in Abuja can be directly linked to this
madness described above. You will be haggling with a house owner to
remove fifty thousand naira from the eight hundred and fifty thousand he
is charging you for 1 year for a one bedroom squeeze in Wuse II and in
your presence, a small girl will show up and offer him one million naira
for the same apartment and offer to pay for 2 years. She is not the one
paying. All she has to do is call and collect the money from one of
these big men mentioned above. Do not blame the landlord who pegs his
rent at a ridiculous amount because the fact remains that demand
dictates pricing. The landlord did not come to Abuja to count flyovers.
He came to make money and if it means joining the fray in other to
benefit from the madness going on in the city, please do not bear him
any grudge.
Lastly, I will talk on the crazy, constant and consistent turnover of
shop owners in high brow shopping malls in Abuja. Flowing from the
narrative above, the same oga still has plenty money to throw around
while he is in office. Sometimes, his wife or more often than not, one
of his mistresses convince him to rent a shop for them so that they too
can benefit from the windfall. And because Harvard Business School is
yet to discover a theory that you can apply to extricate yourself from
meeting the financial needs of a nagging wife or a very proficient
mistress, oga forks out N13Million per anum for an 80sqm space at the
Silverbird Mall and pays for 2 years. Sister then proceeds to stock the
shop with shoes, bags, shawls and clothes she picked up in Dubai. You
enter these shops, you look at the total value of the merchandise in the
shop and you just know that if there is any justice, there is no way
the profit on these goods can pay the rent on this shop. The charade
continues for as long as oga is in office. Note that the lot will still
fall on oga to provide the money needed to travel to stock the shop
periodically. As soon as oga looses his next election or is relieved of
his appointment, the chicken comes home to roost. Oga does not have
money to renew the rent and sister of course cannot renew from the
proceeds of her meager sale so she has to pack out upon expiry of the
rent and pronto, the next mistress or madam moves in and the beat goes
on.
Abuja is a spectacle. For every 10 cars that pass you on the road, 6
of them were purchased brand new. Abuja is a good place to dream and
aspire to greatness. You see regular guys and girls with not much
exceptional talent hitting it big and you are reassured that with
patience and the right positioning, you too will soon make it. Everybody
in Abuja is not a thief but 9 out of 10 Abuja residents benefit from
the criminality in the system. If you do not partake in the looting, you
benefit from those who have looted or you position your business to be
patronized by the looters. Very few Abuja residents can say that they
are exempt from this circle. Not even the Pastors can contradict this
summation unless they have a system that turns back heavy givers until
they can explain where the obscene amount they are ‘sowing into the
ministry’ came from.
That been said, it is advisable that you have a strong moral
constitution before coming to Abuja because without a shade of doubt,
the things you will see in Abuja will test your faith and you need a
solid foundation to remain resolute and straightforward.
Through it all, I still love Abuja and despite all the drama, Abuja remains home for me.
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