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| National Provident Fund Plaza: Abandoned 32 years ago • PHOTOS: THE SUN PUBLISHING |
Proposal of the federal military government was to build a befitting village to house the National Provident Fund (NPF) It is the fund that later changed face and became the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF). If the fund was intended to cater for workers welfare, especially at retirement, it is no surprise that the retirees it is meant to handle their welfare languish in hardship with a premises abandoned this long time and forgotten.
About 32 years ago when the construction commenced, the area, which is about 25km from Mile 2, must have been in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, many must have imagined how and when development would get there. Even Satellite Town and FESTAC that are the nearest major locations to this proposed site were just developing outposts.
Up till today as you read this piece, the towering structure to the left side of the Lagos-Badagry Expressway is still a landmark many stop to ask what it could be. It is located inside the bush seeing it from the road. It’s a symbolic landmark – a tall structure, so imposing and standing upright with so many floors, and not in use.
On getting closer, Saturday Sun found that the structure actually has 21 floors, including the ground floor.
It is located behind the National Postgraduate Medical College and beside the Federal Government College, Ijanikin. It is very visible from about five kilometers on the Badagry Expressway.
It sits on over five acres of land. The 20-storey building has on its sides adjoining buildings of four and five floors. If it was completed it could have been one of the biggest federal government offices in Lagos.
On conservative estimate, the plaza could be valued for as much N50b. With the extent of work done there, possibly up to 50 percent, the FMG seemed to have woken up to a reality that it never actually needed such plaza, and decided to waste the resources put into its construction. If the government had a rethink on that or commenced the project in error, nobody knows if it ever gave the people of the nation any reason for the recapitulation or punished anybody for embarking in the first place on such wasteful mega venture. Nobody, even in the heydays of the privatization blues heard a mention of the NPF plaza for sale or lease. The bottomline is that money put into that project is one of the wastes the nation incurred.
It was a surprise on a visit to the plaza that the building that looks like something put in the middle of the forest beyond people’s reach has actually been put into sundry and diverse uses. The government left the plaza uncompleted, and never made any attempt to think of what to do with it, but the people who today live in the neighbourhood have found so many other uses for the place. The new functions that fill the vacuum created by the government neglect may be ignoble or base, but they are still some use, and possibly better than the total abandonment. Because houses would not allow vacuum like nature, the people have filled the multi-floor plaza with bestial and raunchy activities. The things that happen there would be of much interest to the police, NAPTIP and NDLEA. In fact, the police live up to the challenge of holding their beat in the improvised use of the building. It is their goldfield as they so often raid the place, taking captives the other users for ransom or bail money. A man who operates a driving training outpost there informed Saturday Sun that the police in the area have found a hobby in storming the place very often to take away people they find smoking Indian hemp or just loitering for one flimsy charge or the other, take money from them and release them thereafter.
Suffice to say that the government might have allowed the place fallow to help boost illicit sex trade, drug dealing and abuse, petty crime and hibernation of laggards and the destitute who have found home there. The noblest activity in the vicinity is driving tutorials as the compound has been turned to driving training ground, with some spots serving as automobile repair workshops.
For those that have found a sex haven here, the rooms and apartment augment for short-time sex chalets. For some others it is a place where meetings. It is where people who could not afford to pay for short time service in hotel go to satisfy their sexual urge. Even though there are no beds, they just go there with mats or loincloths spread on the floor to do their thing. Whatever floor patrons choose to have fun is at their discretion, nobody pays a dime, questioned or molested, except for those who are unlucky to be there when police come for raid, which is targeted at mainly at Indian hemp smokers. It is very hard at any time in the day not see randy male and female in heat having their act in this government place turned raunchy turf.
This place has become the most popular spot for Indian hemp smokers. It also serves as office for the local Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) in the area.
For those marijuana smokers, it is a very safe place to smoke and sleep when weighed down by the hypnotic influence of the weeds. Policemen storm there occasionally to raid and arrest some of them. During such raids, the cops may exceed their bounds While raiding the hideout the police are said to sometimes exceed their bounds and arrest the people that hibernate for sex, and might take money from them to let them free or as someone volunteered, help themselves to the act and get their appeasement in kind.
Various artisan unions and associations have made the building their meeting venues. In the daytime, various groups meet at the ground floor. They come with their chairs and tables. If it is not commercial motorcycle riders, it may be another group, but the place is usually busy.
A white garment church is by the swampy side of the premises. There are other buildings that spring up within the premises, which is still part of the government space for the NPF
Outside the building is a flat space of land that driving schools use for their business. Automobile mechanics and other artisans also have spots on the land.
A mechanic that has his workshop within there said that it is the good use the people make of the abandoned building that has kept it from being overtaken by weeds and wild animals these 32 years.
He said, “since the government has abandoned the building, it is better people put it to very good use. If people had not converted the building to private use, by now, no one would access this place because it would have been overtaken by weeds and not only that dangerous reptiles would have found it a comfortable place to inhabit.”
Tracing the age of the building, the mechanic said he was in his teens when the project was started and that a baby girl that was born at the time the construction commenced had got married and by now has up to four children. By his reckoning, the building is supposed to have been started when work commenced on the Badagry Expressway, possibly during the later days of the Yakubu Gowon administration or sometime in the early days of Obasanjo’s regime.
Sun news online
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