By Daniel Nduka Okonkwo
Anambra State occupies barely 4,844 square kilometres of Nigerian soil, making it the second smallest state in the federation after Lagos. That number alone should alarm anyone who understands what is happening beneath it. Governor Chukwuma Soludo has himself acknowledged, most recently while declaring a formal state of emergency on the state’s environment to mark Anambra’s thirty-fifth anniversary, that gully erosion has already eaten up more than thirty percent of the state’s total landmass, turning what was already a small territory into an even smaller one, and turning land scarcity from an inconvenience into an existential threat for millions of Igbo families whose entire notion of inheritance, security, and generational wealth is tied to the ground beneath their feet
Against the weight of these mounting realities, the issue can no longer be ignored. of physical shrinkage that Anambra’s other, more insidious crisis has metastasized: the organized, often allegedly violent, and frequently unresolved seizure and disputed acquisition of communal and family land by networks of alleged grabbers, syndicates, and, according to some complaints, individuals who may have exploited gaps between civil and criminal law to avoid accountability.
This is not a marginal problem playing out in obscure corners of the state. It is a structural crisis touching Awkuzu, Ifitedunu, Abba, Enugwu-Agidi, and communities across Anambra East, Njikoka, and Awka North, where boundary disputes and alleged unlawful dispossession have displaced families, destroyed farmlands and economic trees that sustained rural livelihoods, and in some cases contributed to communal conflicts that have left families without homes and livelihoods.
In Enugwu-Agidi and the Mbanano land axis specifically, protesters have, in representations concerning disputed ancestral lands, named a prominent land actor and alleged the involvement of private security personnel in activities surrounding the disputed properties. The name in question has been submitted to the relevant state authorities and is not repeated here, in keeping with the position taken by affected communities across Anambra that such matters call for proper determination by the appropriate authorities rather than public naming ahead of investigation. The matter remains one of competing claims over ancestral land.
In Awkuzu and Ifitedunu, a businessman has been named in complaints and representations made by members of the affected communities and civil society groups concerning disputed land transactions and alleged forceful dispossession. The allegations have been serious enough to attract the attention of state authorities, including the convening of investigative processes, and his name likewise has been placed before those authorities rather than published here.
In Abba, residents have similarly petitioned the relevant authorities concerning alleged irregular sales of ancestral land and incidents of harassment. In a public statement issued this week, youths of the community confirmed that several individuals had been mentioned in connection with the allegations, while stressing that they were not declaring anyone guilty and that appropriate authorities should investigate the allegations, examine the relevant documents, and establish the truth. This report adopts the same position and the same restraint. A local titled figure has similarly been named in representations connected to the matter, and that name too has gone to the authorities rather than into print.
These are not isolated grievances. They are data points in a pattern, and patterns demand institutional response, not case-by-case improvisation.
To his credit, the Soludo administration has not been entirely silent. The state has announced its intention to review existing laws with a view to formally criminalizing land grabbing and restricting property development to certified, licensed professionals, a move aimed squarely at individuals who operate outside lawful regulatory structures, including those accused of forging documents or facilitating fraudulent allocations.
The Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development has ramped up demolition of illegal fences, shanties, and structures that violate the state’s mandatory road setback requirements, including the two-metre setback enforced along walkways and the six-metre setback enforced along drainage channels bordering state highways, while the Ministry of Lands has issued public warnings against speculators attempting to sell government-owned land such as the Ogboji axis, and the State Executive Council has moved to ban unauthorized youth associations from imposing illegal levies on genuine developers.
The Office of the Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, currently held by Tobechukwu Nweke, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has personally led the prosecution of individuals arraigned under the state’s Homeland Security Law, has also begun reviewing pending criminal cases tied to land disputes, motivated by a genuine and defensible concern that the criminal justice system has repeatedly been weaponized to prosecute what are, in substance, civil property disagreements, clogging the courts and the prisons alike with matters that belong before customary arbitration or civil litigation rather than a magistrate’s criminal docket.
That reform effort deserves acknowledgment, and this report will not pretend otherwise. But it also exposes the central contradiction that this investigation must put squarely before the Anambra State Government, the people of Anambra, the Federal Government, and Attorney General Tobechukwu Nweke personally.
The same administration that has used the Homeland Security Law, signed by Governor Soludo in January 2025, to criminalize certain conduct involving native doctors who allegedly make charms for kidnappers, fraudulent pastors staging miracle scams, and get-rich-quick spiritual con artists, on the reasoning that such actors can provide psychological or spiritual cover for violent crime syndicates, must also ensure that existing criminal laws are vigorously enforced against land-related conduct that independently crosses the line from a civil dispute into criminality.
The comparison is not that every land dispute should be prosecuted under the Homeland Security Law. It should not. Nor is it that a disputed claim of ownership automatically constitutes a criminal offence. It does not.
The real question is whether a genuine dispute over title, possession, or boundaries should become a shield against prosecution where there is credible evidence of independently criminal conduct such as forgery, fraud, criminal intimidation, assault, malicious damage, unlawful destruction of property, conspiracy, or other offences arising from the dispute.
If the state considers conduct that facilitates violent criminality sufficiently serious to warrant specialised security legislation, then it must equally ensure that those who allegedly use violence, intimidation, forged documents, or organised criminal methods to dispossess citizens of land are investigated and prosecuted under whatever existing criminal laws properly apply, where the evidence supports such action.
The state cannot coherently insist that the criminal justice system must distinguish between a civil grievance and criminal conduct in one category of cases while failing to make the same distinction when criminal conduct allegedly occurs in the course of a land dispute.
Land grabbing in Anambra is not always a clean property dispute between two parties with competing paper titles. In some of the cases examined for this investigation, allegations have included forged or questionable documents, the involvement of unauthorized local actors, the deployment or involvement of private security personnel, the use of bulldozers or demolition equipment, harassment and intimidation, and attempts to use law enforcement or other institutions to exert pressure on parties to disputed transactions.
Where such allegations are supported by evidence, the matter goes beyond the simple question of who holds a better title. It becomes a question of whether separate criminal offences have been committed in the process.
That distinction matters enormously.
Prince Chinedu Ikeanyi, son of the late Igwe Davidson O. Ikeanyi of Enugwu-Agidi, a community in Njikoka Local Government Area, put this starkly in an interview for this investigation. Resident in the United States and, by his own account, financially comfortable, Prince Ikeanyi has chosen not to walk away from the fight for Anambra land and for Enugwu-Agidi to be free of land grabbing, a decision that itself says something about the scale of what is at stake.
His position, echoed by residents across the affected communities, is not that the state has done nothing, but that the state’s prioritized security architecture has focused overwhelmingly on violent-crime enablers and public extortionists under specific executive and legislative measures, while the enforcement gap around land disputes persists despite mounting public outcry.
Land-related unlawful dispossession, in other words, must not be allowed to become a lesser concern simply because land disputes often begin as civil matters. The human cost can include displacement, homelessness, the stripping of children’s inheritance, the destruction of family wealth, and the weakening of the rural economic base.
The economic and environmental consequences of this enforcement gap radiate well beyond the individual families who lose access to their land. Ongoing land conflicts and the constant threat of illegal reallocation have created a hostile climate for legitimate real estate developers and outside investors, leaving contested areas economically stagnant at precisely the moment the state can least afford it.
Buyers are reportedly swindled into purchasing fake or heavily disputed plots, sometimes forced to pay multiple levies to competing local factions simply to develop or repair property they legitimately purchased.
And because so much of this activity operates outside licensed or regulated frameworks, uncontrolled sand mining, illegal excavation, and unauthorized construction on fragile slopes may compound the very gully erosion crisis that is already swallowing a substantial portion of the state. Land grabbing, therefore, is not merely alleged to be taking Anambra’s soil from people who claim legitimate ownership; some of the activities associated with uncontrolled development may also be contributing to the physical disappearance of that soil altogether.
None of this is being written to dismiss what the Soludo administration has attempted. It is being written because half-measures against a fully organized or deeply entrenched problem will not hold.
This report recommends and puts before Governor Soludo and Attorney General Nweke a clear roadmap.
The state should strengthen existing customary and civil land-dispute resolution mechanisms and consider, where constitutionally and statutorily permissible, properly resourced and formally recognized specialized land-dispute mechanisms in conflict-heavy local government areas. Where the customary land tribunal model reportedly established in Oba has produced useful results, the state should study the model and determine whether aspects of it can lawfully and effectively be replicated elsewhere.
It should fully implement the recommendations of any existing panels of inquiry set up to investigate communal clashes and land-related conflicts rather than allowing their findings to gather dust, a familiar pattern in Nigerian governance that this investigation will continue to track.
It should ensure the prompt and impartial investigation and, where sufficient admissible evidence exists, arrest and prosecution of those who finance, direct, or participate in organized land-related criminality, including alleged financiers and fake developers. Enforcement should not focus exclusively on low-level individuals who may be carrying out alleged acts on the ground while leaving those who allegedly finance or direct the operations untouched. Deterrence only works when accountability reaches the full chain of responsibility supported by evidence.
And it should build a dedicated inter-agency protection and monitoring framework combining the Ministry of Lands, relevant state security agencies, appropriate local government structures, and traditional institutions, including Igweship structures, to vet and monitor large-scale land developments before they metastasize into the kind of violent, generational disputes now playing out from Enugwu-Agidi to Abba.
The Attorney General’s ongoing review of criminal land cases is a necessary correction against the historic abuse of police power by wealthy claimants, and this report does not ask the state to reverse course on that reform.
It asks instead that the same discernment applied to separating civil grievance from criminal conduct also be applied honestly in the other direction, so that the review does not become, in effect, a shield behind which genuine criminal enterprises involving forged documents, fraud, armed or violent intimidation, unauthorized demolitions, or other independently prosecutable offences are quietly reclassified as civil matters and allowed to continue.
There is a legitimate constitutional and legal reason for refusing to turn every land dispute into a criminal case. But there is an equally compelling reason for refusing to allow the existence of a civil land dispute to prevent the investigation of genuine criminal offences committed in connection with it.
That is the balance the Anambra State Government must now demonstrate.
The people of Enugwu Agidi, Awkuzu, Ifitedunu, Abba, and other communities are not asking Anambra State for sympathy. They are asking for the same institutional seriousness the state has already demonstrated in confronting other forms of conduct that it considers threats to public safety, extended at last to those accused of taking their land, their inheritance, and their children’s future out from under them.
Anambra is shrinking.
What remains of it deserves to be protected by the law and, where ownership is lawfully established, preserved for the people who have always called it home.
Daniel Nduka Okonkwo is an investigative journalist, human rights advocate, and publisher, and the founder of Profiles International Human Rights Advocate, PIHRA. His work focuses on governance, accountability, and the protection of fundamental rights across Nigeria and Africa. His reporting has appeared in Vanguard, Daily Trust, Sahara Reporters, African Defence Forum, Opinion Nigeria, and Daily Intel, among others.
Read more of his work on the PIHRA blog: https://profilesinternationalhumanrightsadv.blogspot.com
For tips, feedback, or collaboration, reach him at dan.okonkwo.73@gmail.com
