The Public Complaints Commission (PCC) has appealed to the Ekiti State Government to pay up N429 compensation owed farmers whose valuable crops were destroyed and farmlands taken over in 2013 for the construction of the State International Cargo Airport.
The federal commissioner in-charge of Ekiti PCC, Mr Kayode Bamisile, who made the appeal vowed that the commission will mediate in the dispute between the state government and the protesting farmers over the alleged non-payment of the compensation.
The farmers, who staged a peaceful protest to the PCC office, in Ado Ekiti, the state capital at the weekend, to register their displeasure over refusal of the state government to pay up their compensations, are from Igbogun, Aso -Ayegunle, Ijan Ekiti, Igbemo, and five other adjoining farmsteads under Ado Ekiti capital city.
They lamented that many of them have lost their lives, with many nursing sicknesses over the government’s action.
Bamisile who interfaced with the aggrieved farmers, described the displacement of land owners and farmers from their lands without commensurate compensations as crass administrative injustice.
The federal commissioner said the ideal situation for carrying out such a laudable project would have been to compensate the land owners first and the community being displaced.
Bamisile said, “This is the responsibility our office is saddled with. It is wrong for the people in offices or the government itself to use their offices or their pens to commit, if I may say an administrative injustice act, which is what this is.
“These are people whose cash and food crops like cocoa, corn, palm trees, plantain, banana, yam, are farmers and that is where they earn their living and the place is the source of livelihood. And to perpetrate such an act for over ten years and the people are still not being compensated, is absolutely unfair.”
The PCC boss, who frowned at the action added: “We are appealing and making a demand from the state government , in the good person of Governor Biodun Oyebanji who has been the governor of the people to look into this matter and ensure that the are compensated adequately in terms of the present value and not 10 years ago.
