Where road used to be now walled, cutting the road into two and making Sapon Sawmill inaccessible.
Sapon, a popular area in Abeokuta, is in the heart of the business district of the state capital.
Its market is a mecca to many as it stocks not only domestic bric-a-bracs but also other essentials that make life comfortable.
One of the thriving departments of this market is a sawmill and plank section ensconced behind a once bulbing General Post Office, now outpaced by technology which had brought a contraption called GSM, rendering communication not only seamless but also unnecessary to post letters.
A canal behind the abandoned Post Office afforded a stretch of land which is a road into the ancestral quarters housing the sawmill. Along both sides of this stretch of road, the sawmill perched.
Sapon Sawmill and Plank Market is very important to its frequents who come from even Abeokuta’s adjoining towns as the state capital is a burgeoning megalopolis where new edifices spring up daily.
The road into the sawmill is also extremely essential to it, not only because it afforded its shoppers a snappy drive in and out, it also give the market the semblance of an aesthetically planned business center.
But this road is now the bone of contention and the raison d’etre for this piece you are reading. The road has not only been commandeered, it was done with impunity too.
Somebody who sees the commercial advantages in the market probably wants to own a stall desperately. Motivated by inordinate profit and beclouded by greed, the desperado put immediate returns above logical town planning as he or she had now taken over the road by sealing it off to put his own structure in the market.
In the wee hours of the night last week, the misdemeanant erected hurriedly a wall across the road to block the road and lay claim to the space.
With the blockage of the road, human and vehicular movements are now totally barred.
The most annoying thing about it all now is that to the chagrin of all good people of Abeokuta who believed in decency and the rule of law, this usurper seemed to have gone scot free (or Nigerian free) as nobody is yet to reprimand him and demolish his eyesore.
Two things can be immediately deduced from this annoying business, one is that Abeokuta seems to joy in making a ghetto of it’s towns and the other is that probably there is no Town Planning Authority in Abeokuta or Ogun.
Or is there any Town Planning Authority or Ministry responsible for the environments in Abeokuta, nay Ogun State?
