Farmers operating inside the Idanre forest reserve in Ondo State and the governor’s special assistant on Agric and Agric-Business, Akin Olotu, are trading blame over the alleged N30 million identity card fund.
The 10,000 farmers said they paid N3,000 each for identity cards to recognise them as governments’ tenants but no I.D card was issued.
In a petition to Governor Rotimi Akeredolu through their lawyer, Tope Tomekun, the farmers said Olotu used his proxies to make them pay N6,000 each for recapturing ‘but they were issued N5,000 receipt’.
The farmers, who said they are engaged mainly in commercial cocoa farming for over two decades at their various camps in Idanre Forest Reserve, were granted possessory farming rights/licence in 2019 through the Ministry of Agriculture.
According to them, Olotu assured them the land won’t be taken from them when they met to clarify rumours about the sale of 30,000 hectares to a private consortium, after they had paid an aggregate sum of N700,000 as cost for surveying the land to ascertain the extent of where they occupied for their lease assessment .
The farmers urged Akeredolu to investigate the role of Olotu under the Ondo State Agribusiness Empowerment Centre (OSAEC).
But Olotu said the farmers were blackmailing him. He challenged the farmers to name his proxies who collected money from them because ‘the private firm engaged by the government collected the money for the ID cards’.
According to the governor’s aide, the government gave the land to a consortium for mass cultivation of cocoa, oil palm and cashew.
“It is blackmail. When the programme started, it was handled by a consultant under the Ministry of Agriculture. I didn’t supervise it. It is nonsense. The N10,000 they paid was for the government. It was the issue of kidnapping that made the governor asked the farmers to register. The government asked them to pay N10,000 per hectare annually as land rent. The money did not go to my purse,” he added.
