Plateau State governor Barr Caleb Mutfwang yesterday expressed his commitment to implementing the anti-land-grabbing law passed by his predecessor, Senator Simon Bako Lalong, to retrieve all the communities and villages taken over by terrorists across the state.
LEADERSHIP reports that over 54 communities have been renamed and taken over by land grabbers in the state.
Mutfwang made this known shortly after the Task Force for the Resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPS), presented its report at Little Rayfield in Jos.
He stressed that individuals cannot simply take over people’s land as if it does not belong to anyone, adding that settling or occupying someone else’s land as though it were theirs is uncivilised.
According to him, all lands belong to society, and anyone wishing to acquire land must follow the proper procedures.
He pointed out that it is uncivilised to establish or take over people’s land as if it were no man’s land.
“All lands belong to people and the community, and anyone seeking land should go through the normal procedures. Let me remind everyone that the Lalong administration enacted an anti-land-grabbing law. We are looking at how to enforce the law; People cannot just see and occupy a piece of land.”
Mutfwang further said there is no vacant land anywhere in the world; somebody has a claim on it, and we will not allow that to happen.
“If you want land, we will make it easy for you to occupy it, and we will make it easy for you to acquire one, but please don’t just go and occupy land as if it’s no man’s land. It is not right, so I want to assure you that this report will not gather dust on the shelf; we’re going to study it meticulously and make sure that we realign the land administration processes.”
He pointed out that the state government has set up a task force to begin recovering state assets illegally in people’s possession, adding that most of the government property is in the process of being documented.
“The issue of displacement of people on the Plateau has been going on for over 15 years now, and for more than two decades. When I went on air to say that some communities had been taken over, I was castigated as a liar. I’m glad that your report is going to vindicate us.”
According to him, one of the challenges they had was the unavailability of statistics over the years. He said, “I’m glad that we are taking steps to document things.”
“Let people who want to challenge those statistics interrogate them; we’re ready to have them interrogated. If you said that the community we allege was taken over, and the name you say is not true, we’ll set up a team, and both of us will go there. It is so easy to verify, you know facts don’t lie, so all we are saying is that the issue of displacement of people has to stop, and number two is that people need to return to their ancestral homes.
“Nobody wants his life fractured and dislocated. We still go back to our villages because there is an emotional attachment, which is part of the quality of our lives, and when you dislocate people like that, it creates a dysfunction in their system, and we don’t want that.”
Speaking earlier, the committee chairman, Air Commodore Christopher Pam, said the committee recommended the deployment of sufficient military, police, and community-based vigilante forces in all the volatile areas.
He said, “We equally recommended construction of 14 new mini-barracks or outposts in strategic locations, which were named in our reports to complement the one already established in Gashishi through Kura Falls.
