The people of Ubahu Community in Nkanu East Local Government Area in Enugu State have bemoaned massive land-grabbing activities on their ancestral land, and appealed to Enugu State Government to intervene to forestall unrest.
The people, who said this during a peaceful demonstration with placards held in the community on Thursday, purported that their ancestral land had been taken over in various axes of the community by people with no identity.
NewsBits reports that the Ubahu community is an immediate neighbouring community to the Owo community, which is the home community of Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State.
The angry demonstrators brandished placards that read: “We Have No Place to Farm; Due to Activities of Unknown Land Grabbers” and “Our Land Is Completely Taken Over By Alleged Different Government Officials Without Due Consultations”.
Other placards read: “Our Houses Are Mapped Out for Demolition, Farmlands Forcefully Taken and Plan to Chase US Out from Our Ancestral Land” and “We Have No Place To Farm and Hunger Is Taking Over Ubahu”.
The Acting Youth Leader of the community, Mazi Chukwuebuka Nnaji, who spoke during the protest, said that the entire community had been put into confusion due to massive land-grabbing activities on the community’s ancestral land.
According to Nnaji, the massive land-grabbing activities had been carried out by persons whose “mission and identity are not clear.” He explained that when a group, organisation, and government want to acquire land for developmental purposes, it is done in an organised, coordinated, and people-informed manner, leaving no one in doubt of their intention.
Nnaji said: “The present development, seeing several unknown people occupying several land portions in different locations of the community, is unacceptable. We are worried as nobody, or authority is talking to us or explaining issues to us. The entire land takeover, if genuine, is not done in an organised, coordinated, and people-informed manner.
“We know by the Constitution, all land belongs to the government; but before the government, there are people who owns the land by ancestral heritage that needed to be carried along.
“As a government, you cannot come to take a communal or ancestral land without formally informing the traditional ruler, the President-General, prominent elders, and other stakeholders of the community.”
Also speaking, a woman leader in the community, Ma Ugochi Uzoma, lamented that the pieces of land most households cultivate each year had been forcefully taken over, while most women, including widows, were forced out of their farmlands.
Uzoma noted that recently, some of their houses were marked for demolition by the alleged land grabbers so that they can expand into massive land portions.
“The people doing this only have the intention to kill us through hunger and sickness following it, or we permanently relocate from our ancestral homes/land, and they take over. We are pleading for help from everybody. Some people are planning to wipe us out from the face of the earth. Our ancestors will never allow them to succeed,” she said.
Ubahu community is an immediate neighbouring community to the Owo community, which is the community that Gov. Peter Mbah of Enugu State hails from.
