Future – Pepel sitting on powder keg
Everything went loose with the land tenure system in Pepel Island, the scavenge land where African Minerals are exploring the creek for a possible transportation of iron ore deposited there ready for export.
The Island has spent barren years with a lack of employment facilities. Such situation has allowed a reduction of population as most indigenes went to explore greener pastures elsewhere.
The employing assurance of giant African Minerals Company has attracted an influx of both employees and job-seekers that are having attendant needs of accommodation as the housing structures in the Island will no longer contain the growing population.
Employment has empowered most workers who are now in high demand of land to put on houses, as lively as the island has become a potential business hub.
Reports of confrontations as a result of land encroachment, coupled with the absurd of traditional land tenure rights are both not helping matters. Such land sales in the views of locals are neither legal nor otherwise. By and large, heredity is the only major source guaranteeing land ownership in that slow-burgeoning community.
Much as the long period of non-development witnessed the lack of initiatives that would have necessarily boosted the moribund nature of the Island’s infrastructural improvements, many are left to wonder what the authorities are doing with the royalties paid in by the giant mining company.
Until one believes that the Pepel Township could not still boast of good roads, with its rugged stony streets still continuing to provide the desire for electricity at height, the health condition of its inhabitants remain a travesty.
The common in-fight of indigenes of that Island is unnatural, but their wedging minds have robbed them of the initiatives of keeping the utility factor for them to be able to compose a better life standard.
Many observers have opined that, if police presence is not increased and the chieftaincy controversy in the Lokomasama chiefdom is not resolved, a lot of head counts will head into more trouble.
As the Native Administration Court System in the township is prejudiced of malice and sectional inferiority, many residents of that Island buried their hopes in their physical might to handle issues with their fists.
By Abu Bakarr Sulaiman Tarawally
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