The Socio-Economic Research and Development Centre (SERDEC) Sunday called on President Bola Tinubu to close the gap of marginalisation and socio-economic inequality against the indigenous people of the FCT.
It noted that military rule contributed immensely to the uncoordinated management of the capitalisation of the FCT thereby taking away indigenous people’s lands, territories and resources.
The Executive Director of SERDEC, Tijani Abdulkareem, who stated this Geneva, Switzerland, at the ongoing 16th Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People, urged the government to follow the path of global standard.
The Monitoring and Evaluation Officer of SERDEC, Sarah Shichet, in a statement, quoted Abdulkareem as saying that successive democratic governments had refused to democratise the process of the nation’s capital with effective mechanisms for compensation and socio-economic inclusion of the people.
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The statement partly reads: “SERDEC emphasises the need for inclusion and participation of Abuja indigenous people in governance. That Decree 16 of 1976 which created Abuja militarised the rights of the Abuja indigenous people and displaced them from their ancestral land through a military-managed dictatorial compensation.
“The relocation process lacked democratic and transparent firm to infuse socio-economic justice for the FCT indigenous people”, adding that the ILO Convention 169 emphasized on the protection of indigenous peoples, including their intellectual and cultural property rights.
“Subsequent democratic governments have refused to democratise the process of mainstreaming the FCT indigenous people into state, local and national framework of economic, political and social development, this has presented glaring inequality across all fronts.”
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