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From Noah Ebije, Kaduna
A former staff of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Rasheed Ezekhagbe has dragged the management of the Academy to Court over alleged illegal eviction from his residential quarters in Kaduna.
Ezekhagbe told journalists that while he was relying on court injunction, restricting NDA from evicting him from the house, soldiers stormed the quarters by midnight and evacuated all his belongings to the NDA office.
The former staff, who worked as a lawyer in the legal department of NDA and retired in 2021, after attending the retirement age of 65, told newsmen that: “The motion for contempt came up today,October 8, but the defendants, they filed a counter-motion yesterday evening October 7, after closing, where my lawyer was served in court this morning, October 8. So we are going to move that motion, and then they will move that motion, and then we will take another date for the ruling on those motions”.
Though the Counsel to NDA, Al-Ameen Abubakar, declined comments on the case to journalists, saying he didn’t have the mandate of his clients to talk to the media on the matter.
However, earlier in Court, the presiding Judge, Justice M. M Ladan of Kaduna High Court 4, adjourned the case to December 11, 2025,for further hearing.
Meanwhile, Ezekhagbe further narrated his ordeals to journalists, saying,”While I was in the service of the NDA, I had a government quarter and by the monetizing policy of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo administration, they decided to sell all the government houses and that’s number nine Lokoja close, Barnawa, where I got an offer which I paid for in stages of two weeks, after the offer you’re supposed to pay 10% of the offer as an acceptance fee and then, you pay the other in two other installments, which I did, but by the time I retired on March 1,2021 and by June 2022, the NDA wrote a vacation order to me that I should vacate the premises.
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“I had to come to court because the Presidential Implementation Committee (PIC) has already offered me the place so I came to court and I got an injunction that they should not evict me and do any other thing in the house until the determination of the suit.
“So the suit was ongoing. In fact, it came up for hearing on June 4, 2025. Unfortunately, the judge did not sit, so they took an adjournment for today, which is October 8. After June, there was the legal break and all that, so the hearing was supposed to come up today, October 8, 2025.
“But in the middle of the night, around 12.30 a.m. of June 6, I was already asleep, when I heard banging on my door .When I peeped through the window,I saw soldiers in my compound. So I came downstairs, and they said they were from NDA. They have come to show me my new accommodation. I told them, I’m no longer your staff, and you can’t show me a new accommodation. In any case, this is my house.
“They said, well, that’s the order they were given .In order to avoid any confrontation, because they could shoot the door open and all that, I opened the door for them. They had come with a truck. They packed everything in my house, put them in the truck. Those that couldn’t go into the truck, they put them in the two garages I had, because I had built two extra garages there. They put them there and took me to NDA old site, and gave me one room.
“So I came out, drove my car back to town, looked for an accommodation, and then I went and packed my things there. So we now had to, because since there is an existing order that they shouldn’t do what they have done, we now filed counter proceedings against the NDA and the commandant. And that procedure is supposed to have come up, is supposed to, is to come up today. In a nutshell, that’s what happened.
“I was traumatized. I mean, you can imagine sleeping in your house at 12.30 a.m., and then, armed soldiers came to move you out”.
