No fewer than 55 communities in four local government areas of Edo State yesterday protested the acquisition of the communities’ rainforest reserve and farmland by the state Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, in spite of pending court cases on the matter.
Addressing journalists at Uhonmora, Owan West Local Government Area of the state, Spokesman of the affected communities, Mr. Tony Erha, lamented that the governor was bent on ceding their land to his allies, regretting that the governor had acted defiantly to courts cases on the issue and other series of petitions written by the communities.
“Today, the over 55 communities, supported by the Owan General Assembly, the Tabitha Women Prayers Group, a global charity with headquarters in Belgium and the United Kingdom, the Nature Conservation Observance of the United States of America and indigenes of our communities at home and in the diasporas, are intensely opposed to the movement of bulldozers by the Edo State Government and its proxy companies to our two remaining ancestral rainforest reserves of Owan BC 10 and luleha/Ora/Ozalla,...