NDLEA Denies Sale of Agency’s Ikoyi Property

Michael Olugbode in Abuja

The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has insisted that none of its property is being sold off by any former chairman or Chief Executive Officer of the agency.

A statement issued yesterday by the spokesman of the agency, Femi Babafemi, described claims in an anonymous write-up going round on WhatsApp platforms that a certain former chairman/CEO of the agency sold off NDLEA headquarters office buildings in Ikoyi, Lagos, leaving officers and men stranded, as a total distortion of facts.

The statement read: “The agency wishes to state that buildings referred to in the circulating piece, which did not belong to it in the first place, served as its national headquarters before its relocation to Abuja some years ago. It should be noted that a Presidential Implementation Committee (PIC) on Federal Government Landed Property took over the buildings following a government directive that all vacated or underutilised government property be taken over by the PIC, sold and proceeds paid to federal government coffers.”

The statement added that: “At the time of relocation, 70 percent of the agency’s headquarters staff moved to Abuja while the remaining 30 percent are still in Shaw Road office, Ikoyi. This remaining 30 percent will soon join the main headquarters in Abuja as soon as the new HQ building, recently bought by the federal government for the agency, is ready for occupation.

“Like other federal government agencies whose property were taken over by the PIC, NDLEA has no hand in the sale of the mentioned property and does not know who bought them and for how much, as the presidential committee solely handled the sale.”

Babafemi said the challenge before the agency at the moment “is how to remove our officers and men who live within communities where they are exposed to dangers into secure barracks accommodation, a concern already being addressed by the federal government through budgetary provisions for the construction of such barracks across the country beginning from this year.”

He, therefore, urged members of the public to disregard the anonymous write-up, insisting that it is nothing but “an embodiment of distortion and mischief.”