Respite may be coming the way of the original inhabitants of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, as the Federal Government has concluded plans to relocate them to their permanent site in 2015, the Chairman, Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory, Senator Smart Adeyemi said in an interview with the News Agencies of Nigeria, NAN, on Thursday in Abuja.
According to Adeyemi, the government is already creating districts to ensure the smooth implementation of the relocation next year.
This, he said will bring relief to the problems of the original inhabitants of the FCT.
“In next year’s budget, effort will be made to look at the possibility of providing a good percentage of the revenue allocation for natives to move to their permanent sites.
“Compensation is a serious problem due to the dwindling national revenue; the oil price has not really been too stable.
“And the government is facing so many challenges; so, the allocation to Federal capital Territory has not been quite encouraging.
“That explains why we are coming with a revenue board to look at the possibility of improving the internally generated revenue of the FCT so that they can meet some of these problems.
“By and large, the problem of compensation is the issue of money.
“The FCT is ever expanding, the roads are getting congested. There is need to expand and construct more roads and all these, of course, affect other sectors.
“But I must equally emphasize that the government has done appreciably well in terms of the needs of the indigenous people”, he said.
The Senator complained that the original inhabitants had been selling the estates built for them by the Federal Government.
“I must equally say that some of the estates have been completed but have been sold by the natives to other Nigerians, making the problem of movement a bit difficult.
“The Garki village, the indigenous people there ought to have moved but the painful thing there is that the new site provided by government, the houses there have been completed, about 90 per cent of the houses had been completed and sold to other Nigerians by the natives and if you move them, they have no place to lay their heads”.
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