Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu orders a police CSP to leave Magodo. The man told the state chief security officer he wouldn’t.
The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was publicly told by an unnamed Chief Superintendent of Police that he wouldn’t take orders from him, even when on paper, Sanwo-Olu is the Chief Security Officer of Lagos State.
The Incident took place at the Magodo Estate where there is a standoff between the residents and a family claiming to have a court judgment that permits them to demolish at least 300 houses.
According to Punch, the CSP told the Lagos State Governor that he and his armed colleagues were at the estate on the orders of the Inspector-General of Police, Usman Baba; as well as the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami (SAN).
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Sanwo-Olu had said to the CSP: “Can you call your superiors in Abuja and tell them that the governor is here and as the Chief Security Officer, you don’t have any business being in my state right now and that I want you to disengage right now?”
But the unnamed CSP replied the Lagos State Governor: “I am here on the instruction of the Inspector General of Police through the AGF. I am too small or too low to call them. Your Excellency sir, you can call them sir.”
Asked of the number of policemen at the estate, the defiant leader of the police team told the governor, “My men are here; they are all over the place, I cannot precisely tell you how many we are. For security purposes, I cannot tell you the number.”
After many failed attempts, the Lagos State Governor, miffed, turned to journalists and declared the presence of the policemen as illegal, adding that he would make some calls to the IGP and the AGF.
A dissatisfied Sanwo-Olu said, “They (policemen) are not from the Lagos State Police Command. They said they are from Abuja. I don’t know what other interests they have beyond keeping the peace of the country. This is not an expectation that I expect from them because they don’t have any business here.”
TheNiche had reported on December 22, 2021, Magodo residents woke up to find hundreds of policemen bearing guns, claiming they were enforcing an alleged court order which allegedly gave the Adeyiga family more than 500 plots of land in Magodo.
The Lagos government, according to what sources say were details from the judgment, was supposed to allocate the said land to the family. And since they thought that the Lagos State government was foot-dragging in allocating the land to them, the Adeyiga mobilized policemen and hired bulldozers to allocate the said 500 plots of land to themselves, which meant the demolition of at least 300 houses in Magodo Estate. But the said properties being marked for demolition were legally acquired by the residents from the Lagos State government, which also gave them Certificate of Occupancy (CofO).
