By Owoleye Oluwakayode
Residents of Lekki Gardens Ajah Phase 2, Lagos are lamenting what they described as infrastructural degradation at the estate.
The residents took to the street in protest against the developer’s alleged failure to fulfill the promise of making the estate habitable.
Speaking on the ordeal faced since relocating to the estate, the General Secretary of the Residents Association of Lekki Gardens, Dr. Awolola Eniola, recounted how efforts to contain the challenges met with a brick-wall.
“I have been in this estate for over five years, and it’s been one trouble after another. At some point, because of the sewage issue, we had to take the developer to the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and the agency gave them a timeline to do the right thing while advising them on the appropriate thing to do,” Eniola said, “But to our surprise, most of the things that they were mandated to do, they haven’t done them.”
“The agency even served them notice which expired 18 days ago. So we are at the risk of the agency coming to seal-up the entire estate because it’s considered not habitable.
“They said for people to reside here, the developer has to put key infrastructures in place.
“We bought these properties upfront so we are like the developer’s partners and we had an agreement based on the things he promised to deliver to us.
“If you look around you, an estate of over one thousand residents, is without a functioning sewage and clinic.
“In the past three months, some incidents that could have been averted occurred because we don’t have a clinic.
“How can somebody build these and give us just two transformers?
“We have to tax ourselves to get extra transformer to extend the 33KVA power line to go round.”
Eniola stressed the need for Lagos State government to come to their rescue as he claimed the developer had started erecting other structures on “already overstretched structures.”
The association General Secretary added, “If he cannot help us, he shouldn’t complicate our problem. The developer still comes in building more structures.
“Now tell me what infrastructure are those structures going to use? There is nobody in this estate that has not done reconstruction in one way or the other due to dilapidation in a short while.
“We have written countless letters to the developer but he ignored us.
“Information has it that he said there’s nothing we can do to him as he’s connected to the powers-that-be in Lagos.”
Regarding transformers, on his part, the Chairman of the Water Committee for the estate, Olawale Hassan, who was obviously upset at the state of the estate, said: “We lost four transformers within six months.
“We had to tax ourselves to buy another set.
“And the developer gave us a timeline on the transformers but he didn’t keep to it.”
Regarding leakage, another resident, Mr. Tony Igho, who is also the Road Coordinator for Roads 9b and 9c, said, “As you are aware that we are in the rainy season, in just 30 minutes’ rain, you can see the level of flood in the estate.”