A Lagos-based businessman, Sogo Adeyemo has accused his landlady, Leonora Lawanson of constant harassment and threat to life in a bid to eject him from his apartment.
Mrs Lawanson however denied taking illegal action to eject Mr Adeyemo from his apartment at No. 27, Ajibola Crescent, Alapere, Ketu, a suburb of Lagos.
Adeyemo said Lawanson aimed to force him out of his two-bedroom apartment despite an ongoing lawsuit at an Ikeja Magistrate’s Court.
“I am a yearly tenant and the last time I paid my rent she wanted me to write an undertaking to vacate my apartment when the rent expired. Although I paid the rent through one of her daughters called Sola, I did not write any undertaking because it was against the principle of fairness and justice. When my rent expired in April 2015, I wanted to pay but she refused to collect the money from me and instead filed a suit at an Ikeja Magistrate’s Court to eject me from the building.”
He added that the landlady had since caused some of her children to harass him while efforts made to arrest them have failed.
“There was a day she led some of her children to vandalise my bathroom in a bid to intimidate and forcibly eject me from the building. As I speak, the bathroom has not been fixed while they have damaged some windows in my apartment.
“When she took me to the Citizens Mediation Centre (CMC) in Ikeja, the mediators warned her not to resort to self-help in order to eject me from the building. They advised her to approach the court to seek redress.”
In a telephone conversation with The Nation, one of the landlady’s children, Mr Dare Lawanson, who spoke on behalf of his mother, dismissed Adeyemo’s allegations as bunch of lies.
He said: “He has not paid his rent regularly for two years now and was given a six-month quit notice, but he has refused to vacate his apartment. Instead, he has since resorted to blackmailing us. We discovered that he had no job when he started defaulting on his rent. In fact, sometimes, it would take him about seven months before he could renew his rent and I would be the one to plead with my mother to reconsider evicting him from the house.
He doesn’t have a job but stays in the house all day and that is why he does not pay his rent as and when due. The six-month quit notice we gave him had lapsed a long time ago and that is why we took him to court.
“He is not the only tenant in the house, we have two other tenants and they are not giving us problems like him. His bathroom was not destroyed as he would want to make people believe. Rather, we decided to fix the bathroom following his complaints and we took a plumber there for assessment.
“He was not at home on the day we took a plumber to his apartment but he gave his wife permission on the telephone to allow the plumber into the bathroom. The plumber, however, advised that we put a new bathtub there because the one he was using had been completely messed up. Unfortunately, he did not allow any repair to be effected in his apartment following his inability to defray his rent and now wants to use that against us.
My mother is a widow and an unassuming person who took her time to appeal to Adeyemo to be a good tenant to no avail. It will interest you to know that he invited men of Alapere Police Division to our house a few days ago in order to arrest our mother despite the fact we were once taken to the station and asked to make statement concerning the same matter.
“Why should we resort to self-help while the matter is in court? As law-abiding citizens, we could not have been harassing him having taken him to court when he refused to vacate his apartment. He is just trying to draw unnecessary sympathy by taking the matter to the media instead of waiting for the court to adjudicate on the matter.”