Property owners at the Eket-Oron axis of the East-West road being reconstructed as a dual carriageway, have decried the delay in the payment of compensation for buildings affected by the project.

Communities in the area affected by the project have also condemned what they described as the slow pace of work in their own part of the project, accusing the contractor of deliberately delaying progress of the job.

A community leader in Eket, Akwa Ibom, Chief Assam Usoro, said that people of the area were disturbed by the slow pace of work on the project.

Usoro said that rather than kick-start development in the affected communities, the road project had brought hardship to owners of properties, which had been marked for demolition more than five years ago.

He said that the owners had neither been compensated nor earned rents from the buildings, because tenants had moved out while prospective ones were avoiding them.

“You will remember that the communities in this area had a meeting with the contractor, Gitto Nigeria Ltd, after we threatened to protest the abandonment of the project.

“Since the meeting in which the company promised to step up construction activity, nothing new has happened there, compared to other sections of the project being handled by other contractors,’’ he said.

He added that the state government which brokered the meeting had done nothing to make the company to sit up.

“Many people have relocated from the area and the marked properties are also dilapidating and nothing is really being done by Gitto to pay compensation or continue with the job.

“In this situation, we don’t know where to take our appeal to but we are hoping that some sense of responsibility will prevail.”

When our source visited the construction site office of the contractor at Eket, the place was desolate and it was difficult to reach the Project Manager for comment.