In what have been described as bizarre incidents, an alleged weird and recalcitrant tenant and wife, who hitherto were residing at 78, Amudalatu street, Agodo-Egbe, Ikotun, Lagos State, Mr. Raycherry Onyia and Mrs.Oyiza Peter, have been accused of deliberately setting his rented apartment on fire after unsuccessfully and unlawfully contesting the control of the building, which they have been occupying as first tenants since 2012, shortly after the property was completed by their landlord, Mr. Samson Ubasinachi Ekweozor, who is based outside the country.
The embattled landlord in an interview with our Correspondent, bemoaned his predicament in the hands of his over bearing and dictatorial tenant since September 2013, that he first returned to Nigeria.
Police Source also confirmed that following protracted clashes between the landlady, Mrs. Anulika Ubasinachi Ekweozor and the tenants wife Mrs Oyiza Peter, the tenant and wife are presently facing four criminal charges bordering on arson, conduct, false information to police and assault occasioning harm, after four different police divisions, DPOs and commands found them liable.
According to the aggrieved landlord, instead of his tenant to clear his cases with the police, he has resorted to defamation and assassinating his character by taken his defense to the social media with fabricated and disjointed information laced with tissues of lies, shortly after two Divisional police Officers and Area command found them wanting and liable.
Trouble was said to have started when Raycherry Onyia, being the first tenant out of the three tenants that the landlords Inlaw rented the flats out to, while the landlord was still residing outside the country, bluntly refused to participate in the agree periodic environmental sanitation in the compound, also refusing to pay his house rent, Electricity, water, refuse disposal bills and other utility bills.
ACTION BY THE LANDLORD: Unable to continue harboring the alleged troublesome tenant, the landlord from his base abroad said he directed his lawyer to issue him with quit notice , which his tenant did not comply with. threatening to use his own lawyer to employ delay tactics in frustrating the decision to quit him, while at the same time elongating his stay in the flat until he completes his own building project.
Reacting,on his second arrival into the country on December 27th, 2016, the landlord said that he found out that the same tenant continued his nuisance disposition despite earlier undertaking to be of good behaviour, having begged and appealed to be allowed to continue to stay in the flat.
On April 28, 2018, the landlord said that he traveled back abroad, only to be informed in March, 2019, that the tenants wife attacked his wife with weapons over unpaid Electricity bills, slashed her eyes with a venomous bite and she was rushed to hospital.
The injury inflicted on his wife propelled the landlord to fly back to Nigeria in November 2019, and before his return, he decided to quit all the tenants in April 2019 through his lawyer.
The landlord said that he further directed the Electricity supplier (NEPA/PHCN ) to disconnect Raycherry Onyia, until he pays the backlog of his bills. He also cut off his water supply pipes and redirected the pumping Machine serving the entire compound, which was earlier wrongly connected to Raycherry’s meter line, to his own meter.
This action by the landlord was said to have inflamed Raycherry Onyia, who reacted by threatening to beat up his landlord, who he addresses as ‘small boy’, threatened to bring down the entire building with Acid and destroy the entire pipes in the compound.
Immediately after NEPA disconnected Raycherry Onyia, he was said to have illegally reconnected back his light and when the landlady went to confront him, Raycherry wife pounced on her and grievously wounded her eyes and disfigured the landlady’s face.
The landlord then reported the unprovoked attack and assault at ikotun police Division, under the watch of CSP Emmanuel Onah, who detained the Enugu State born Tenant/wife, directing them to take up the treatment bills from the injury they inflicted on the landlady while suing for peace.”But they refused to pay for the hospital bills”, Ekweozor lamented.
However, during the periodic sanitation of the compound,Tenant Raycherry Onyia and wife did not participate and when the landlady inquired from her why she did not clean her agreed and assigned area, she allegedly started making fool of her, reminding her of her injuries and permanent scars she gave her earlier and another fight ensued.
In the course of the fight, the tenant’s wife allegedly used a razor blade to cut the landlady, who was said to have overpowered her and wounded her more with the same razor.
Raycherry Onyia, having notice that his wife sustained severe injuries, was said to have reported the case at the same ikotun police division as attempted murder case under a new DPO, CSP Johnson Adagba, who after considering the facts presented and level of injuries sustained by both parties, partly treated the matter as a case of two fighting, but however detained the landlords wife for three days and at the end of investigation, landlady was asked to pay the hospital treatment bills of tenants wife.
Not satisfied with the police decision, Raycherry Onyia, allegedly rejected the N300,000 offered by the landlord for his wife’s treatment but greedly demanded for N31 million as treatment cost to enable him fly his wife abroad for plastic surgery.
Raycherry Onyia is said to be battling to extricate himself from the accusation of arson, after he allegedly set the flat he had occupied for Eight years as a tenant on fire.
“Due to anger over fresh notices to quit that served him shortly after the last fighting incident, my tenant secretly moved his car and valuables to a location at okota area of Lagos before setting his flat ablaze”, Ekweozor said.
FALSE INFORMATION OF BOMBING TO THE POLICE
While the flat went up in flames and neighbours and volunteers battled to put off the fire, Raycherry Onyia, the Landlord said, dashed down to Ikotun Police Division and falsely reported that his landlord bombed his apartment.
However police investigators led by the DPO, CSP Johnson Adagba, that responded to the false bomb alert, were said to have dismissed the claim, stating that the fire was ignited by Electrical power surge.
Despite having reported the case to Comrade Onojah E. KenPeaceMaker Human Right Group, who incidental is his wife’s brother from kogi state, who also sued for peace, Raycherry Peter, who was identified as An importer and Exporter of goods from Singapore, took to social media, allegedly misinforming the public and deliberately destroying his former landlords integrity, uploading Ekweozors’ family photographs on the internet.
However while narrating his own side of the story, Raycherry Onyia, allegedly reported that the landlord and wife physically assaulted his wife for his refusal to quit their apartment after the expiration of a quit notice.
He told our correspondent and other newsonline that he was asked to vacate his apartment barely one month after packing into the flat without any plan to refund money paid for the rent.
He accused the landlord of inflicting permanent scars on his wife’s face over anger emanating from his refusal to quit his apartment.
“We don’t know the reason we were asked to move out, the whole drama started during the COVID-19 ESCALATION lockdown and we had nowhere else to go. I was out of work at that time and we were battling to feed and survive during that period, when they asked us to vacate the apartment which we had just rented and moved in.
Determined to make us leave the apartment, he disconnected our power supply, plunging our apartment into permanent darkness and we resorted to using a generator.
As if disconnecting our power supply was not enough,he disconnected the water supply to our apartment. It was at that point that my husband asked him to refund part of our rent if he truly wanted us to leave. one day I went to take water from our bowl close to the window to prepare food for our children and as I was returning to our apartment, our landlord suddenly appeared and held me from behind and his wife used a sharp object to attack me and slashed at my face, neck and other parts of my body and before I knew what was happening, I was covered in blood. It was my screams of pain that caused my husband who was inside our apartment to run out and took me to the Police Station and we were giving a letter and referred to the hospital for treatment.
I spent two weeks in the hospital,it was God that saved my life because there was so much blood everywhere, ” Oyiza Peter stated.