Claim: A viral video shows a husband demolishing a mansion he built on his wife’s land in Ghana after the couple completed a divorce process in court.
The video in question was shot in Nigeria and not in Ghana. The demolition also has nothing at all to do with marital differences as suggested in the caption of the video.
Full Text
A viral video of a two-storey mansion being demolished has been making rounds on Facebook for more than two days.
The 57 seconds video shows an excavator pulling down the structure.
An accompanying text shared on Facebook claims that a husband built the mansion on a piece of land belonging to his wife in Accra and that after the couple completed divorce processes in court, the man decided to pull down the building.
“Rift between husband and wife. Husband lives abroad, wife lives in Accra Ghana. Land belongs to the woman, but the man built the house. Both in court for divorce. The judge asked wife to take possession of land and the husband to take possession of the building. Since the man cannot move the building off the land, the wife thought he will abandon the house for her, instead he brought bulldozer to pull down the house,” the post claims.
The video has been shared many times on Facebook, WhatsApp and some websites.
Facebook pages such as this, this, this and that have published the video with the same narration which has since garnered more than 200,000 views across the different pages.
Verification
With the assistance of the InVID video verification tool, we conducted a number of reverse image searches that generated results linked to news publications about a mansion being demolished in Abuja, Nigeria.
One of such reports by Sahara Reports is titled, “FCT Ministry Demolishes Multi-Million Naira Mansion Belonging To Tonto Dikeh’s Ex-lover, Kpokpogri In Abuja.”
According to the May 14, 2022 report, “the mansion, which is in the Asokoro area, was invaded on Saturday at about 8am by officials of the FCT Administration with a bulldozer which began to demolish the building.”
Sahara Reporters on its Facebook page shared an extensive live video, 29 minutes long, of the demolition exercise.
Further Google searches on the news item, brought up reports by This Day [Newspaper] and Punch Nigeria also showing images of the same building in the viral video as being the property of one Joseph Egbri, popularly known as Kpokpogri, an ex-lover to Nigerian actress, Tonto Dikeh.
This Day in its report said the building was demolished under the authority of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) because it was not approved.
“FCTA officials said that it had no approved building plan before it was built on a plot of land belonging to the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) for the purpose of its mass housing programme,” the report noted.
It quoted FCTA’s Director, Department of Development Control, Muktar Galadima as saying the building obstructed a major road network, connecting the popular Apo Bridge to many parts of the city.
“There was adequate inter-agency co-operation. The Federal Housing Authority approached the Federal Capital Territory Administration for allocation and they were given global approval and were asked to make sure that whatever they do aligns with the approval. The plot in question was part of what was in the allocation, but because of the importance of the road, we wrote to FHA, notifying it that a number of its plots have been affected by the realignment of the road, and that we were going to give them replacement plots.”
“We told them that no development should be allowed on the plots, and this was around 2019, we came for site visit and have given them notice. We even marked the building for demolition, but the owner cleaned it off,” Galadima said.
Conclusion
Evidence from various news portals confirmed that the viral video claiming to show a husband demolishing a mansion he built on his wife’s land in Ghana after the couple completed divorce processes in court is of an unrelated incident in Nigeria.
I didn’t know that the information was false. I shared it as I saw it with the belief that it was a right information. I am very sorry for that.
So it’s not in Nigeria as per the conclusion paragraph ??!?
Thanks for informing me