Former President, Muhammadu Buhari, has denied acquiring any land for personal or corporate use in Abuja during his eight years tenure as president, saying the land revoked by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, does not belong to him.
Buhari stressed that the revoked plot of land by the FCT minister belongs to the Muhammadu Buhari Trust Foundation in Abuja and not his personal property.
The former president’s claim came hours after Wike ordered the revocation of the plot located in the Maitama District of Abuja alongside 762 others belonging to some prominent Nigerians and corporate organisations.
In a statement by his media aide, Garba Shehu, on Thursday, the former president explained that he was not the owner of the plot allocated to the Foundation named after him.
He explained that the Foundation was floated by some utilitarian individuals around the former Nigerian leader who went about it lawfully but ran into a roadblock in the land department of the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA).
“The Foundation was itself floated by some utilitarian individuals around him who, it must said, went about it in a lawful manner with the support of a number of well-meaning persons.
“But they ran into a roadblock in the land department of the FCDA which handed them an outrageous bill for the issuance of the certificate of occupancy, very high in cost that did not at all compare with the bills given to similar organisations.
“It may have been that this was not erroneous, but a deliberate mistake, making the revocation of land as no surprise to anyone,” he said.
“As a person, the former president has a plot of land to his name in Abuja. When he and his cabinet members were invited to fill the forms and obtain land during his tenure in office, he returned the form without filling it, saying that he already had a plot of land in the FCT, that those who did not have should be be given. He, therefore, turned down the offer,” the statement said.
These were contained in two separate public notices issued by the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA).
In one of the notices, the FCTA said the Foundation’ has an outstanding N1.23 billion to pay for plot number 4873.
