Who Is the Owner of Banana Island? What You Didn’t Know About Its Real Owners

When individuals point out Banana Island, you consider billionaires, non-public jets, ultra-luxury estates, and paparazzi snapping photos of SUVs lining palm-fringed streets. However do you know the island’s origin is as dramatic and deep as its value tags? 

Banana Island wasn’t constructed in a single day. It started within the early Eighties with a imaginative and prescient, a bitter authorized battle, and a pioneer who’d by no means reside to take pleasure in its fame and success. 

Let’s unpack the actual story behind who actually owns, or as soon as owned, this synthetic paradise floating on Lagos Lagoon.

It began with a visionary engineer 

The unique mastermind behind what would turn out to be Banana Island was Chief Adebayo Adeleke, a College of London–educated civil engineer and CEO of Metropolis Property Improvement Ltd. After the Lagos State authorities acquired his land in Maroko, Victoria Island, they compensated him with a swampy land off Ikoyi. 

As a substitute of seeing it as a loss, he noticed a possibility. He conceived the “Lagoon Metropolis” improvement, earlier than it was later developed as Banana Island. Adeleke dredged the swamp himself, employed high engineers, and even employed Minoru Yamasaki, the architect behind the unique World Commerce Centre, to design signature constructions as half of a bigger “Lagoon Metropolis” plan, shaping what turned Banana Island. 

However his triumph was short-lived. 

The Lagos State Authorities confiscated the undertaking, leaving Adeleke and his agency with no compensation. 

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Chagoury Group stepped in and “completed the job”

After Adeleke’s dream was dismantled, the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing recycled his plans and set the island undertaking in movement. It wasn’t till Terry Waya, a businessman and father of Large Brother’s Kiddwaya, heard in regards to the proposal that the Chagoury Group formally entered the scene. Waya claims to have launched the Lebanese-Nigerian agency to the federal government and helped safe the contract.

The Chagoury Group then dealt with dredging, street networks, utilities, and safety, remodeling the swamp right into a smooth property dotted with Ocean Parade towers, underground wiring, and personal facilities

Who really owns it right this moment?

Err.. It is sophisticated. Technically, the Nigerian authorities owns the land. However over time, plots have been offered to non-public consumers, rich Nigerians, rich foreigners, and firms. These consumers now maintain leaseholds or titles, making them Banana Island’s actual and present house owners.

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A household’s misplaced legacy and its public face right this moment

Chief Adeleke’s son, Remi Adeleke, a U.S. Navy SEAL and Hollywood actor, remembers his father’s ambition fondly.

He says the household was as soon as rich sufficient to “sink all his cash” into the lagoon undertaking and allege the federal government stripped them of every part when it legally seized the land.

“The Nigerian authorities stripped us of every part. We went from wealthy to poor, finally forcing my mother, my brother and me to maneuver from Nigeria to the Bronx. My mother would at all times inform my dad, “Put a refund in the USA so now we have one thing simply in case every part collapses.” However he didn’t hear. His precedence was his nation and constructing his nation to be a beacon of sunshine to all of Africa.”

That sense of loss drove his family from Lagos to the US, elevating questions on how one in all Africa’s costliest estates now stands on land initially reclaimed by a person whose dream was by no means legally recognised. The island is right here. His possession isn’t.

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