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By Olaolu Olusina
It’s exactly a month and a half today and everybody has been going about his or her normal business, though in partial or total lockdown, depending on where they live in Nigeria, in this period of COVID-19 induced stay at home.
However, the seven-year-old daughter of Joyce Daser-Adams, popularly known as Auto Lady, is still in shock, and might not forget the incident of that Thursday afternoon in a hurry.
She had just returned from school, looking forward to the normal warm embrace of her mother and some cuddling at the Autolady Garage in Abuja, a place that had become their second home.
But that was not to be as some agents of the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA), numbering over 100, all men, were said to have stormed the garage in a gestapo style, with some of them fully armed.
After failing to gain access to the garage through the main gate, they were said to have forced their way in by pulling down part of the fence before unleashing terror and destruction on the entire facility.
It was a scene the little girl had not seen before in the few years she’s been on earth and, in her innocence and panic mode, she asked her already tensed-up mother, “Mummy, are they going to kill us?”
And as she watched the overzealous men of the FCDA Task Force rough-handle her mother, with one, a policeman, allegedly hitting her with the butt of his riffle for trying to make a phone call, apparently for help, the young girl could no longer hide her fears, thinking the end had actually come, as she cried out, “Mummy, did they shoot you?”
Daser-Adams could not answer her daughter as she came down in tears as she watched, helplessly, what she had laboured to build over the past eight years being destroyed by some overzealous FCDA officials just within 30 minutes, because according to them, she was operating in an area designated as a residential area.
The apparent show of shame by the FCDA officials, including men of the Nigerian Civil Defence Corps, Vehicle Inspection Officers and some policemen, who unleashed terror on a defenceless woman, without a court order for the eviction, had since gone viral and had attracted the attention of The Presidency with the Special Assistant to the President on Ease of Doing Business, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole, paying a fact-finding mission to the demolished workshop.
Oduwole, who is also the Secretary of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC), was said to have promised that the demolition would be investigated since, according to her, the matter had been escalated to the FCT Minister, Alhaji Mohammed Bello, who also promised to look into the matter.
Daser-Adams, a beneficiary of the Federal Government’s YouWIN programme, is a lady mechanic and Founder, Autolady Garage, Abuja and Autolady Inspire Foundation. A Mechanical Engineer by training, she is a member of the Nigerian Institution of Mechanical Engineers (NIMech) and is making her mark in a male-dominated profession. She has trained and keeps training hundreds of Nigerian youth, especially ladies, in the trade, through her personal efforts as well as through the NIMech – backed Girls Auto Squad, a training programme for girls interested in auto mechanical works.
In a telephone chat with AUTO REPORT AFRICA, after the incident, Daser-Adams lamented the setback the demolition would cause her as she put the loss she incurred within that ’30 minutes of madness’ at over N60 million, including the destruction of a newly-installed vehicle – spraying and baking oven.
“The damage they have done cannot even be quantified in monetary terms alone but I will put the value at over N60 million. Most of our workshops were destroyed, the roof of our new spraying oven was badly damaged. And our staff now have no where to go again, they want to send us home, who will pay the workers salaries? They even went away with six vehicles belonging to my customers. It’s quite painful, ” Daser-Adams told AUTO REPORT AFRICA.
Insisting that she was not served any court order for eviction as required by law before the demolition, Daser-Adams also alleged that all efforts to get the FCTA to allocate a new parcel of land for her workshop had been frustrated before the demolition. A copy of a letter sent to the FCT Minister for allocation of a new plot of land was sighted by AUTO REPORT AFRICA. She added that she and some of her staff were beaten up by the men of the Task Force who came for the demolition.
It was reliably gathered that the Minister for Women Affairs, Mrs Pauline Tallen, was also informed about the incident as Daser-Adams actually took the matter to her office in Abuja for intervention .
When AUTO REPORT AFRICA contacted the Director, Development Control, FCDA, Muktar Galadima, who controls the Task Force, to confirm the report, we could not get him to speak on the telephone at the time we had earlier agreed as he later said: “I’m really sorry, in a meeting now with my Hon. Minister, ” in a text message, adding, “Thank you for the concerns,” even as he promised to call later but he did not.
The District Officer in charge of the area at FCDA, Umar Kaka Wuye, later responded to our persistent telephone calls and text messages, saying he wouldn’t be able to comment on it as, according to him, the Director, Development Control, Galadima, was the only person authorised to speak to the press on the matter.
However, another FCDA official familiar with the incident spoke with AUTO REPORT AFRICA on condition of anonymity, saying Daser-Adams was a well – known person to people in the area and had been coming to the FCDA to see how a new place could be allocated to her for the workshop.
“She is a woman we all like because of the way she does her work as a woman mechanic. Everybody likes her work and we’ve been trying to see how we could help her get another place to relocate her workshop as she is operating in an area designated as a purely residential area,” the FCDA official told AUTO REPORT AFRICA.
When asked whether a court order for eviction was actually served on her before the demolition, the official said: “There was an eviction notice served on her last November but she has been coming to plead for more time. But you know this is Abuja, you can’t just come and do anything anywhere.
“The place is a residential area and we at the Development Control of the FCDA have a Ministerial Order to demolish all shanties and mechanical workshops in the area. The announcement was all over the media. It affected others, not only her.”
On the allegations that six of her customers’ vehicles were taken away after the exercise, the official said: “The normal process is for an inventory to be taken before any demolition. But in her case, they were very hostile, they wouldn’t even open the gate for the Task Force to enter. A section of the fence had to be pulled down to gain access into the place. That must have accounted for what happened.”
There is no doubt that fate has a way of playing out in people’s destiny and Daser-Adams has been taking the nasty experience in her strides with an uncommon faith that something greater is definitely on the way for her. How that will happen is what she doesn’t know but the encouraging words and consolation messages from friends and associates from far and near have been keeping her going.
Just before the lockdown occasioned by the need to contain the spread of Coronavirus in the country, the Autolady would go to the workshop with a few of her staff to see what could be done to the rubble. That was a place that had given them joy and satisfaction over the years while contributing their quota to manpower development in the country. Training programmes already planned had to be cancelled as the Autolady awaits justice.
Now, after a month and a half, justice seems to be far from coming. Nobody appears to be taking her matter seriously again, especially now that COVID-19 has taken the shine over almost every other matter.
But must we allow her case to go just unattended to like that? Have we suddenly found ourselves in a season of anomie when seeking justice may just be a waste of time and efforts? Most painful is the fact that the incident happened in March when the International Women’s Day was celebrated and a month dedicated to Women globally by the Commonwealth. If we believe that “injustice to one is injustice to all,” then something must be done, and urgently too because justice delayed is justice denied.
The question many are asking now is: Will Joyce Daser-Adams get justice?
This question becomes pertinent in view of the fact that her ordeal and nasty experience came just a few weeks after the Every Woman Institute released its first-ever SAFER SOONER REPORT.
“For many women around the world, there is no easy path to justice,” excerpts of the maiden report made available to AUTO REPORT AFRICA, stated in part, adding ” Laws, government systems, and social norms favour perpetrators.”
According to the report, “In courtrooms, media, communities, and homes across the world, female victims of violence are often blamed, ignored, and not believed,
entrenching the world in a system of silence and impunity.”
This scenario is already playing out in the case of Daser-Adams as some people, especially in government, are wont to justify the actions of the overzealous agents of the FCDA, some of them fully armed, who descended on a defenceless woman struggling to create job opportunities for hundreds of youth in the country.
