Business
‘I Have Never defrauded Any One In My Entire Life”- CEO Pelican Valley
‘I Have Never defrauded Any One In My Entire Life”- CEO Pelican Valley
The Chief Executive officer of the Award winning Real Estate Firm, Pelican Valley Nigeria limited, Ambassador (Dr) Babatunde Adeyemo has revealed that he has never defrauded anyone in his entire life and even as Pelican Valley has Four lawyers under it, none has ever go to court to defend the company on any fraud related offence.
The Journalist Turned Realtor who hailed from Oyo state said that Pelican Valley has always carried out its Business Transactions with the fear of God ,good will and integrity, saying the organisation’s growth has been gradual because the firm has never delve into what it cannot handle.
According to Ambassador Adeyemo ” I can be bold to say that I have never defrauded anyone in my entire life, I don’t know any DPO, and despite having at least four lawyers under our company’s retainership, none has ever gone to court to defend us because we have always done things with the fear of God, goodwill and integrity. We started small and began growing, we don’t bite more than we can chew, we are contented with our ‘slow and steady win the race’ approach. We are not greedy and we don’t make ourselves vulnerable. I have been doing this real estate business for close to 13 years alongside my career in journalism but I have always maintained a very low profile with it. Some will think I am just making it, no, God has been helping us for some time now but despite that, I was only using a car that I changed its engine five times before getting another one. Patience is the word. Real estate is like a cumulative grade point just like it is in the university. The foundation is very essential in real estate business, there are some things one has got to do before you begin to sell land according to government rules but if you fail to do them and after collecting people’s money you started gallivanting and spending the money as it pleases you, a time will come when a government will come and force you to do what you have failed to do and those things are usually capital intensive. At that time, such real estate merchants will be in trouble, they will think any way is a way, they will want to defraud their clients, cut corners, do anything to survive.”
In an Interview with news Direct and monitored by newsbarrelng The ECOWAS and Anti Corruption Ambassador explained that his quest to be financially independent, stable and love for business were the reasons he diversified from journalism to real estate.
” I have always been someone who wants his integrity intact but I realised most Nigerian journalists are always struggling with the brown envelope syndrome, you know what I mean. Journalists will sometimes see terrible things but keep quiet because they have collected money. So, in a bid to guide against all of these, I started thinking of having a second address, something that will make me to be more financially stable and independent, that was how I got into real estate. It’s something that I have always loved doing because I have passion for unusual homes. The land at Pelican Valley inspired me too. Incidentally, the genesis of my real estate business has two sides to it. When my immediate elder brother was in the university, he had a barbershop and he employed a stylist to run it. However, about the time that I finished my certificate programme from the Federal Cooperative College and I was supposed to observe one year internship, the stylist said he was no longer working for my brother. In fact, he stopped working while barbing one of our customers, I had to pick up the clipper and finished up the barbing. Without ever being trained as a barber, that was how I took up the job and operated the shop throughout my university days. So, it was through barbing that I sponsored my education. Our barbing shop then became an household name such that even when I was in the school, people would wait for me to come home during the weekend to barb their hairs. To cut the story short, after my university education and I was posted to Niger State for service, the business went down, when I came back from the service, I wanted to resuscitate the business but my brother said that we should step up to transportation business. I invested about N1.8m into this business, however things didn’t go the way we envisaged, the business died because neither of us could drive, so I told my brother to let me have one of the cars so that at least I would know that I have not wasted all the money, that peradventure I could dispose the car and use the money for something that I could always make reference to. At Abeokuta here while working as the Ogun State Correspondent for MITV, I met a man, Mr Akanni Taiwo now late, may God rest his soul, who proposed to buying the car while giving me two plots of land in return. One of us, Kunle Olayeni now with Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) Ago Iwoye is a living witness to this epoch-making incident. So, the man took us to where the land is and after showing us the two plots of land I asked if he has more land that I could buy and be paying on instalment, he said he had three acres, so I paid. My original intention of buying the land was to have something to fall back on. My wife was pregnant with our first daughter then, my calculation was that in the next six years my daughter would have been in school and I can always dispose off parts of the land to sponsor her education, I never knew I was buying my future, like I became a realtor by divine intervention.That was how Pelican Valley began. I started rejigging the land because of its topography until it becames what it is today.”
The University Of Lagos Graduate and Masters holder Said he doesn’t like to venture into Nigeria politics because of several factors surrounding it which might directly or indirectly affect ones integrity adding that One can always touch people’s lives without venturing into politics. ‘This is the reason behind the establishment of Oko Opo Foundation. I am willing, however, to serve my country in any capacity if it comes in the form of an appointment.”
He added that his passion for the less privileged was one of the reasons he established the OKO OPO FOUNDATION
“It is just my own little way of giving back to the society. It’s out of my personal conviction to build enduring institution. I don’t really need so much to survive, so I have passion for the less privileged. I have always told my children not to rely on my assets but that I will definitely give them that sound education that will make them stand shoulder high anywhere in the world, give them the platform to fly higher. If you fit into what we are doing in Pelican Valley, then you are free to continue from wherever I stop, but for you to now want to inherit the assets is a no. No for me because I believe that there is no amount of assets that you can inherit that will secure your future. So my emphasis is on building people and institutions that will stand the test of time. The rich goodwill we have garnered over the years in the real estate business has provided us with the springboard to take off with this noble idea.”
On how to Solve Housing Problems in Nigeria, Ambassador Adeyemo said “the bad economy is the major culprit here, once the economy is in shambles as it is now, the housing challenge which requires a bit of capital will suffer. The only thing government can afford to subsidise is land because land is technically said to be owned by the government and even at that, you will still have to pay or compensate the original owners and custodians of the land. Can the government subsidise the cost of the iron, the roofing sheets, cement, cost of labour? For example, if you want to build a standard three bedroom house, I mean those houses that will stand the test of time you will be talking of about N35m or N40m.”
“The government must fix the economy and also ensure that we have the right people at the helm of affairs to ensure that resources for each sector are not diverted or stolen. Look at the fantastic job the Registrar of Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Isiaq Oloyede is doing. Who will ever believe JAMB could be making as much as N8billion, N9billion, so we have to tackle corruption upfront in the country if we ever care to make any meaningful progress. There was a time I was having some amount of money in my account, I used everything to provide electricity for all our estates and up till date I have not charged the people for anything. I could have spent the money as it pleases me because the people only bought the land which I have given them but I thought that I could add further value to their lives and my business. Today, if I want to embark on such projects, I will be talking of over half a billion naira. So, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should really be ready to fight corruption and work with people who are less greedy, it is the bane of our underdevelopment and outright stagnation.”
The CEO Pelican Valley also maintained that the commitment between him and his management team to always do things right and within the ambit of the laws were the reasons why Pelican Valley Nigeria limited has continued to be a leading Real Estate Firm with so many Diaspora customers and several awards received.
“We don’t bite more than what we can chew. Also, the leadership. We always want to do things right no matter how challenging and costly it is, and we always put first the comfort and safety of the investment of our clients. Sincerely, leadership and goodwill that we have built over time is the key. Unfortunately, many youth of nowadays don’t want to buy time at all. I remember one of them that God used me to pick up from the gutter about three years ago that nearly took the business over from me, a business I have been building for close to 15 years, It is that bad. They always act as if they will die the next day, likewise, our politicians… assuming I have the whole of Abeokuta to sell, I can do that today, get all the money, ride my G-Wagon Benz and still go broke later but if I decide to sell say three plots now, add value to it, wait for another five years to sell again, the properties would have appreciated the more by that time. I will definitely make more money and even buy five G-Wagons at a time to ride. That’s how things work in real estate.Time and patience are of the essence in real estate business. I am not always in a hurry to sell my properties. I am a value driven person. I am always scared of collecting money from people because delivery is very crucial for me. That is why we don’t advertise our lands in the media, you won’t hear us on radio, yes, you can see one or two of our billboards in some places and that is just to establish our presence, just to say that we are also existing.
“I intend bringing Dubai into Ogun State. It is not about building slums everywhere in the name of having estates, what goes into an estate is more than the building. What about the infrastructure like roads, electricity and the likes. Even sometimes it is difficult for some state governments to manage five estates due to the fact that it is a capital intensive business, and that’s why they usually give them to private developers most often. For instance, Pelican Valley used to be a very difficult terrain, it used to be a mountain as high as a four storey building but for seven good years, I was busy cutting the hill and landscaping it to different levels, in the whole of Southwest you can’t get a place like the Pelican Valley. Go to Pelican Valley and see things for yourself. After Pelican Valley, we moved to Pelican Brief, since we have been able to do something substantial in Pelican Valley which is like a mini estate. It is our success story there that we are now leveraging on to sell Pelican Brief, which is going to be a smart city. We also have Greenish Acres Farm Estate and Ecostay Apartments where we sell unusual houses too.”
“To Almighty Allah be the glory because I will just be sitting here and I will receive the call that they are coming to honour me, sometimes all the way from Ghana. It makes me feel fulfilled. Few days ago, after that of ECOWAS Youth Ambassador, the Yoruba Youth Assembly all the way from Osun State called to say they have another honour for me. I sincerely thank the Almighty God for everything. He concluded.
NNPCL and Corruption’s Final Throes
By Pius Olasanmi
In the twilight of the Obasanjo administration, when Nigerians were still capable of being outraged, when Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of refineries was a buzzword that still held some mysticism to bamboozle citizens, during a conversation, a certain man said something profound. The man said, “As a businessman, if I were the owner of these refineries, knowing that they are three decades old, I would take the last money I have, hire bulldozers, raze them to the ground, and obtain loans to build new ones.”
When we pressed him further on why he would engage in such waste, he explained that repairing the refineries is the real waste. He explained that even if the TAM were honestly carried out, a thirty-year-old refinery would never compete favourably with a new one that would integrate contemporary technology. Operating at its best, such a refinery would never be comparatively more efficient. It is therefore pointless to have spent another one naira on the refineries at that point.
A few months later, I had a conversation with a then-lawmaker on an entirely different matter. I mentioned that the National Assembly has failed by not crafting legislation that would criminalise and punish public office holders who foist wrong decisions on the country. The logic: a public office holder need not steal to be punished, wrong decisions should attract penalties for an office holder who opts for the worst of all options when there are less injurious ones.
These established premises speak to the ongoing nauseating efforts at revisionism by those who wrecked the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and its previous iteration, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Notably, this campaign to rewrite history is traceable to Engineer Mele Kolo Kyari, the disgraced immediate past Chief Executive Officer of NNPCL and his hirelings. They have suffocated the news and the public opinion space with even more lies than they spun while in office.
The Saint Kyari campaign is anchored on convincing Nigerians that the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna Refineries were fully functional when he was booted out of office. So brazen is the campaign that one of its talking heads challenged the group chief executive officer (GCEO), Engr. Bayo Ojulari, to “inform Nigerians categorically what happened to the functioning refineries he inherited from his predecessor, Engr. Mele Kyari.” The effrontery.
We have not forgotten so soon the charade that followed the baffling claim that Nigeria has spent $2.8 billion on the repair of the refineries, while they are not churning out even a single litre of refined product among them. Saint Kyari and his goons played all manner of tricks, all of which embarrassed President Bola Tinubu, who had counted on ticking off the return to productivity of the refineries as part of his achievements, only to realise that he was deceived into celebrating phantoms. Tragic.
Lest we forget, 200 trucks were arranged as props in a well-directed video clip to celebrate the re-streaming of the Port Harcourt Refinery. The disappointment. Nigerians were to learn from several reports that the Port Harcourt refinery was not producing and was instead using old, stored petroleum products to load trucks. Worse still, the Kyari crew was passing off sanction-tainted Russian-sourced crude oil refined in Malta as locally refined products. More insult was piled on the assault on our collective sensibility with the lies that the Port Harcourt Refinery exported semi-finished products. Brazen.
Meanwhile, Kyari and his hirelings called those who pointed out or protested these glaring scams all manner of names. They hid behind industry technicalities and jargon to create the impression that those of us who knew Nigerians were being robbed did not understand what we were saying. The point remains that a $2.8 billion investment can potentially build a refinery with a capacity of around 100,000 barrels per day (bpd). Of course, the actual capacity of such a refinery will depend on various factors, including the complexity of the refinery, the technology used, and the location. That is the amount that Kyari’s regime at the NNPCL took and did not give Nigerians refined products.
Fast forward to Kyari’s sack and the appointment of Engineer Bayo Ojulari, who has demonstrated that things can indeed be done differently. Kyari’s exit was expectedly followed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) going after him and his associates. The extent of the theft is better understood against the backdrop of N80 billion being found in the bank account of one of his associates. They went on the run.
Perhaps because the EFCC was biding its time on securing international warrants for the arrests of these characters on the lam, they have become emboldened. They have decided to fight back and rewrite the story of their participation in the greatest fraud against Nigerians. Engineer Ojulari’s renewed mindset, which is entrenching a semblance of the transparency Nigerians demand, became their natural target. The demons that once roamed around the corporation came out with malevolence. They started spinning stories of corruption to tarnish the incumbent who refused to hide their crimes. The objective: bring Ojulari down. But alas, he is winning the war as it stands.
His innocence is proven, and it is glaring that those who want him out are mere charlatans who can no longer ply their corrupt wares because of the impact of the new reforms. Corruption in the NNPCL is in its final throes. The fake news being unleashed against the incumbent leadership is akin to corruption’s last kicks as reforms in the sector strangulate it and its practitioners. The reforms must take place in the NNPCL, whether the industry demons like it or not.
As a parting shot, Kyari and his associates would do well to prepare their defence. In addition to accounting for the $2.8 billion they laundered in the name of repairing the moribund refineries, they must also answer for the poor decision to fix that which is irretrievably broken. Awarding contracts for Turn Around Maintenance of 59-year-old refineries that a right-thinking person had suggested should be demolished almost twenty years ago, when they were only 30 years old, is criminal. Trying to deceive Nigerians that the fake repairs worked is treason.
Olasanmi is a public affairs analyst writing from Lagos.
GRANDIS 5STAR LUXURY APARTMENT & SUITES SET TO REDEFINE LIVING IN VICTORIA ISLAND
Set to Rise elegantly against the Lagos skyline, is the Grandis 5Star Luxury Apartment & Suites. According to Adejuwon Ademola, The General Manager of the Development company, it is more than just a residential building
“it’s a lifestyle statement. Standing 17 floors high in the heart of Victoria Island, this revolutionary masterpiece of modern architecture will offer a panoramic 360° view of Eko Atlantic, Victoria Island, and Ikoyi, transforming every apartment into an exclusive penthouse experience for the world’s most discerning elite.”
Developed by Dumarco Construction Limited, a globally acclaimed company with decades of delivering complex, high-value projects in the highly regulated petroleum, oil, and gas industries, Grandis 5Star brings unmatched international safety standards, uncompromising quality, and timeless elegance into Nigeria’s luxury property market.
> “When you live in Grandis, you’re not just buying a home—you’re investing in peace of mind, world-class safety, and an effortless luxury experience that will remain pristine for decades,” says Adejuwon A. Ademola, General Manager of Dumarco Construction Limited.
The Gold Standard in Safety and Quality
Dumarco’s roots in the oil and gas sector mean the company operates to some of the strictest safety protocols in the world. Every stage—from conceptualization, design, construction, to long-term maintenance—follows internationally accepted procedures and quality assurance measures. Cutting corners is simply not in Dumarco’s vocabulary.
> “In the oil and gas industry, there’s no room for compromise. We’ve brought that same discipline and zero-tolerance for mediocrity into property development,” says Ademola. “That’s why Grandis will be one of the safest and most enduring residential developments in Nigeria.”
To ensure transparency and prevent (project complacency), Dumarco deliberately separates the developer, contractor, and consultant roles, engaging only the most competent professionals in each respective field. Dumarco’s project team includes globally recognized contractors such as Julius Berger, Cappa & D’Alberto, and Elalan, Migliore Construczione & Tecniche (MC&T) and their partners VENCO IMTIAZ CONTRACTING COMPANY (VICC) based in Dubai, UAE, Business Contracting Limited, alongside leading consultants like Morgan Omanitan & Abe, LAMBERT, and James Cubitt.
Grandis – Investments, appreciation, returns and profitability
Our selection process for the location of the project alone was pains-taking and completely thorough scientific process. Top professional companies were employed to conduct a scientific data acquisition and analytical survey of the entire Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lekki and Eko Atlantic before a project site is selected. Analyzing and acquiring areas developmental charts and trends, studying and gathering historical and present sale prices, rental charge and occupancy rates over a 50 year period from every individual street before the selection of the location of any of our developments especially true for the Grandis Project
He adds,
“Our clients and residents can be rest assured that the location of Grandis has been scientifically proven through all existing data to provide our clients with a 100% occupancy rate, highest developmental location, highest rental income and investment returns. ”
The Grandis Experience
Located minutes away from international corporate headquarters, embassies, and landmarks such as Eko Hotel, Radisson Blu, and the Radisson Red, Grandis offers unmatched convenience for professionals, diplomats, and high-net-worth individuals. Every residence is designed for both indulgence and efficiency, with high-grade finishes, smart-home systems, and private amenities that ensure seamless living.
From sunrise over the Atlantic to the glittering Lagos night skyline, residents will enjoy uninterrupted luxury, supported by discreet and highly trained staff, advanced security systems, and a design that prioritizes comfort and privacy.
> “We designed Grandis for people who want everything—security, elegance, convenience, and the assurance that their home will look as spectacular in 20 years as it does on day one,” Ademola notes.
A Legacy That Lasts
With its combination of visionary architecture, peerless safety, and meticulous maintenance planning, Grandis is built to remain iconic for generations. Thanks to Dumarco’s meticulous approach, the building’s service charges are expected to remain low while its value and appeal continue to appreciate over time.
In a market often marred by shortcuts and substandard practices, Mr Ademola says
Grandis stands as a beacon of what luxury living should be—safe, spectacular, and built to last.
“Grandis 5Star Luxury Apartment & Suites — Where safety meets sophistication, and every detail is designed for a life well-lived.”
He added
Website -www.dumarcoltd.com
Project website – www.26idowutaylor.com
Email [email protected]
Tel / WhatsApp +234 9077777883
GM – Adejuwon A. Ademola
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