Prospective home owners in Nigeria were beaten and tear gassed by police as they queued to buy up cheap houses being sold off by the civil service.
Houses are very expensive in the capital, Abuja, where landlords often demand two years rent in advance.
Thousands of people turned up trying to buy 872 houses from the Federal Capital Territory administration.
The houses were being sold at a fraction of their value and police struggled to control the crowd.
An apartment in a central area of town will cost at least 1 million Naira ($8,474) per year to rent. But there were properties on sale this week for as little as 2 million Naira ($16,949).
Cheap property
Buying is usually out of the question for the urban middle class.
Property rights are flimsy. Many who bought land under past administrations have had their houses bulldozed by later governments.
But at the sale in Abuja on Tuesday, people were eager to get hold of properties they considered “untouchable”.
‘Sore losers’
Frustrated buyers accused the FCT of fixing the sale so the houses could be sold to cronies, but the FCT denied it saying the accusations were made by “sore losers”.
In the queue at Abuja’s Old Parade Ground un-uniformed thugs armed with sticks whipped and beat people as uniformed police looked on.
One policeman, armed with an assault rifle and a tear gas gun told a BBC reporter taking pictures of the scene: “If you snap us slapping them I will shoot you!”
Police used tear gas to disperse the buyers several times during the three day sale.
“People are desperate for a house, the competition in the queues is heavy, and the police have to control that,” said FCT police spokesman Musa Ahmed.
He said the un-uniformed men were probably agents of the State Security Service (SSS).
‘Ashamed’
“I’m very ashamed at the way this has been handled,” said Olushola Samson, a 59-year-old businessman who lives in a house on the outskirts of Abuja with his family.
“The officials are very corrupt. They have sold the houses already. Where we live now has no water and very little electricity. How many more years do I have to live like that?”
But spokesman for the FCT, Diran Onifade, said the process was transparent.
“We have to do it like this because if we take in bids into the office people will accuse us of being corrupt. The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission has been involved at every level. There is no possibility of corruption.”
He said the sale of houses was necessary to “create a new middle class in Nigeria”.
The houses were the last remaining of 30,000 homes built for civil servants.
The rest were sold to their occupants over the last four years.