By Wale Obanigba, Esq.
The recent position canvassed by the Ondo State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Dr. Olukayode Ajulo, SAN, on the proposed takeover or compulsory redevelopment of allegedly abandoned private properties across Akure and other cities raises profound legal, constitutional, economic, and moral questions.
Ordinarily, no responsible citizen would oppose urban renewal, environmental sanitation, or structured city development. Cities evolve. Planning laws exist for a reason. Governments possess legitimate authority to enforce development regulations and maintain environmental standards.
However, the present proposal becomes disquieting when situated within the broader governance pattern already highlighted in my earlier piece titled “Ondo State at 50: Beyond the Celebrations — Politics of Liquidation and the Dismantling of Public Inheritance,” published on 28 January 2026.
In that intervention, I warned that Ondo State was gradually drifting into a dangerous governance culture characterized by the systematic disposal, fragmentation, and privatization of inherited public assets originally preserved by earlier administrations for future generations. I referenced the dismantling of strategic public inheritance, including the fate of Owena Hotel, the allocation of vast government land reserves behind The Dome in Akure, the destruction of environmental assets like the Omi-Eja Forest Reserve, and the planned demolition of public housing estates established during the Adekunle Ajasin era.
The central argument of that piece remains even more relevant today. A government that continually liquidates public assets loses the moral authority to posture as the guardian of urban planning discipline against private citizens. That contradiction lies at the heart of the Attorney General’s position.
For over two decades, several government-owned buildings and projects within Akure metropolis, especially around Alagbaka, have remained abandoned, uncompleted, or underutilized. Some structures initiated by previous administrations have become permanent monuments to waste, inconsistency, and policy discontinuity.
Ironically, many of these abandoned public structures are located within the same Alagbaka axis repeatedly referenced by government officials as requiring urban sanitation and redevelopment. Some are within proximity to the Governor’s Office and Government House itself. If abandonment now constitutes sufficient justification for state intervention, should government not first account for its own derelict properties before threatening citizens with compulsory acquisition?
The concern becomes more serious because the current proposal is emerging against a backdrop of widespread public anxiety over the handling of state assets and land allocations under the watch of the current administration. Citizens have watched strategic government lands, housing estates, forest reserves, and institutional spaces steadily disappear into private hands through allocations, concessions, and politically connected acquisitions. It is therefore impossible to separate the present urban renewal rhetoric from existing fears about elite capture of valuable urban land.
More fundamentally, the Attorney General’s proposition raises constitutional and legal implications. While the Land Use Act vests land in the Governor to hold in trust for the people, such powers are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Section 44 of the Constitution guarantees citizens protection from compulsory acquisition except under clearly defined conditions involving overriding public interest, due process, and prompt compensation.
The phrase “overriding public interest” cannot become an elastic political doctrine deployed to dispossess citizens merely because buildings remain undeveloped, unpainted, or economically unattractive to government planners. Otherwise, dangerous precedents emerge.
Who determines what constitutes sufficient development?
Can economic hardship, family disputes, inheritance complications, litigation, inflation, or inability to access financing suddenly become grounds for state takeover?
At a time of severe economic strain, many property owners are struggling simply to survive. A government that threatens compulsory redevelopment under such conditions risks weaponizing urban planning laws against economically vulnerable citizens.
The proposal regarding the relocation of the College of Agriculture and Forestry further deepens public concern. Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are not primarily suffering from urban location problems. They are suffering from chronic underfunding, infrastructural decay, inadequate laboratories, poor research facilities, insufficient hostels, and near-total dependence on TETFund interventions for capital development.
Relocation is not development. Moving a tertiary institution from one location to another does not automatically produce academic excellence, agricultural innovation, or research capacity. Indeed, several globally respected agricultural institutions operate within urban centres while maintaining expansive satellite farms, research annexes, and practical training facilities outside the city. The fundamental issue is investment and institutional commitment, not geography.
This naturally raises public suspicion as to whether the real attraction lies not in educational reform, but in the enormous commercial value of institutional land within Akure metropolis. Urban renewal must never become a euphemism for elite land acquisition.
It is contradictory for a state whose own institutions suffer from a dearth of infrastructural development to threaten the relocation of a federal institution. If relocation proceeds, who will bear the cost?
If the government genuinely seeks a modern Akure and a more organized Ondo State, the process must begin with transparent planning, preservation of public inheritance, rehabilitation of abandoned government projects, enforcement without selectivity, environmental protection, and restoration of institutional credibility. The state cannot continue to liquidate inherited public assets while simultaneously threatening citizens with compulsory redevelopment in the name of modernization.
That would not amount to urban renewal. It would amount to selective expropriation wrapped in developmental language.
As I argued in my earlier article, government holds public assets not as private property to be traded at will, but in trust for present and future generations. The same principle applies to the exercise of compulsory acquisition powers over citizens’ properties. Without transparency, fairness, consistency, and public trust, urban renewal quickly degenerates into organized dispossession.
Ondo State deserves development. But it must be development anchored on legality, accountability, sustainability, and responsible public trusteeship, not governance that mortgages public inheritance while threatening private property owners in the process.
Wale Obanigba, a legal practitioner, writes from Akure, the state capital.
