Secrets Reporters
The scaffolding has barely come down. A completed Carrefour mall, wearing the blue and red of France’s biggest retailer, already stands in Abuja five months after the franchise papers were signed, and it is not alone. Six Carrefour malls now stand built or rising across the Federal Capital Territory in five months, planted on a green area, on land held by the Abuja Environmental Protection Board, on the foot of a bridge, in the middle of a highway, and on the memorial park where Abuja buried the victims of a building collapse. Every one of them belongs to one Nigerian company, Hyper City Retail Limited, the company The Sun has flatly called the property of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, and that Sahara Reporters has named a Wike front company. The minister who controls every plot of land in Abuja is the same man whose confidant and whose personal lawyer sit inside the company taking the land.
The France door
Carrefour is France. Carrefour S.A. is a French company, headquartered at Massy outside Paris, listed on the Euronext Paris exchange, with no controlling shareholder and no Nigerian name anywhere in its share register. When Carrefour decided to enter Nigeria, it did not open its own subsidiary. On Tuesday, 14 April 2026, in Abuja, it signed a long term franchise with Hyper City Retail Limited, under which HyperCity converts its four Port Harcourt stores to Carrefour and builds more than 75 stores across Nigeria in four years, overseen from France by Carrefour Partenariat International.
President Bola Tinubu’s government blessed the signing in person. His Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, stood in for the President at the ceremony and used the occasion to praise Wike publicly for the pivotal role he played in facilitating the franchise. France is the country this President visits above all others. He took a full state visit to Paris in November 2024, the first by a Nigerian leader in over two decades, and has returned to France again and again since. The dividend of that dalliance now stands on Abuja land in French colours, and the company holding the keys on the Nigerian side is the one tied to his Minister of the Federal Capital Territory.
The company
Hyper City Retail Limited was incorporated on 18 May 2022, registration number 1931320, while Wike was still Governor of Rivers State. Its registered business is retail trading, estate management and the importation of general goods. Its shareholders are not men. They are two companies, Aleed Construction Limited and Tech Farms and Estates Limited, and no public record anywhere names who owns Tech Farms and Estates at all.
Its two directors are a study in the same pattern. The first, Roukoz Sarkis Rachid, is a Lebanese national with an address on Aba Road, Port Harcourt. The second, Chinda Chika Nwenenda, has no existence outside one line of the company’s Corporate Affairs Commission status: a name, and a service address on Old Refinery Road, Elelenwo, Port Harcourt. No biography, no photograph, no second directorship, no public footprint of any kind stands against the name. The company’s managing director, Sunny Chawla, is a career supermarket executive recruited from the SPAR chain. He runs the stores. He does not own them.
Inside Aleed Construction, the larger truth sits in the open. Corporate Affairs Commission documents obtained and published by Sahara Reporters in December 2024 place two men on Aleed’s register with 500,000 shares apiece. The first is Sandy Onor, a director of the company, the 2023 governorship candidate in Cross River State and a man described across the reporting as Wike’s confidant. The second is Ferdinand Orbih, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria described in the same reporting as Wike’s personal lawyer. Sahara Reporters named Aleed a front company of the minister, controlled for him behind the register. The Sun, in August 2024, dropped the caution entirely and wrote of HyperCity as a supermarket owned by the Minister of the FCT, Nyesom Wike. No registry record names Wike himself in any company in the chain. What the records name, at every layer, is his circle.
Six malls in five months
The Abuja builds identified to SecretsReporters stand as follows. One mall occupies a green area off Bola Ahmed Tinubu Street, near the headquarters of the Federal Capital Development Authority. One stands on land of the Abuja Environmental Protection Board in the Central Business District, the agency charged with protecting the city’s environment, its ground now carrying the supermarket of the minister who oversees it. One rises at the very entrance of the Guzape bridge, at the foot of the bridge on Muhammadu Buhari Way, directly opposite the yard of Dantata and Sawoe. The biggest of them is a multistorey build at Jabi, standing beside the AA Rano complex on land Abuja set aside as a memorial. One stands at Ushafa. One stands at the Guzape junction, on the road from Garki. Two more are rising, one directly opposite the Utako motor park and one planted in the middle of the highway on the stretch between the Central Bank headquarters and the Nigerian Television Authority. Six completed or nearing completion in five months, on land that Abuja’s master plan gave to green, to the environment agency, to a bridge and to the dead.
Under the Land Use Act, every square metre of the Federal Capital Territory is administered by the Minister of the FCT. No green area is built upon, no agency land changes hands and no plot is reallocated in Abuja without the minister’s machinery moving. The franchisee taking this land is the company The Sun calls the minister’s own.
The mall on the memorial
One of the six can be proved to the last signature line that exists in public, and it is the worst of them. Plot 230, Cadastral Zone B05, Utako, on the road to the Jabi motor park, is the ground where a building under construction collapsed on 29 July 2008 and killed at least six men. The title to the plot was revoked after the collapse, and the ground was dedicated as a memorial park to the men who died on it. It stayed a memorial until 2024. Then, inside Wike’s tenure as Minister of the FCT, the plot was quietly reallocated for commercial use.
Daily Trust investigated the ground and established two facts that nobody has denied. A senior official of the FCT lands administration, speaking anonymously, confirmed that the plot has been reallocated for commercial purpose and is now private property. And Julius Berger, the construction giant physically building on the plot, confirmed the identity of its client: Hyper City Retail Limited. What no official will state, in public or to the newspaper that asked, is who received the reallocation and whose signature carried a memorial park into a supermarket. The Director of Lands for the FCT, Chijoke Nwankwoeze, would not answer. The minister’s own spokesman, Lere Olayinka, would not answer. The families of the men who died on the plot in 2008 have never been identified in public, and nobody in the FCT administration has told them their memorial is now a mall.
The Rivers template
None of this is new method. It is the Rivers method, moved to the capital. HyperCity opened its first store in Port Harcourt in 2022, and at the inauguration, Governor Wike told the gathering, on the record, that the land for the store was secured from government. The minister who gave the company its land as a governor is the minister administering its land as the landlord of Abuja. In Rivers, the pattern ran through the same names. When Wike signed a certificate of occupancy on 12 November 2024, for 99 years, over the revoked Life Camp estate land of the late Colonel Ogbebor’s family, the company receiving it, Saravera Nigeria Limited, carried two directors on its Corporate Affairs Commission record: Kingsley Chinda, his closest political ally in the House of Representatives, and Adapoyi Akor, the same two men Sahara Reporters named as the hands behind Aleed. Chinda is today the All Progressives Congress candidate for the governorship of Rivers State in 2027, the minister’s chosen successor. The circle does not widen. It only relocates.
France’s flag now flies over the model. Carrefour lent its name, its colours and its supply chain to a franchise whose Nigerian holder sits inside the circle of the minister who controls the land the stores are rising on, and the presidency stood at the signing to bless the arrangement and praise the minister’s hand in it. Six malls in five months, a green area gone, an environment agency’s land gone, a memorial park gone, and at no point in the chain, from the CAC register to the reallocation file, does any official paper carry the name of the man every finger points to. [RIGHT OF REPLY: questions to the FCT Minister and the FCTA, to Hyper City Retail Limited and to Carrefour go out with publication and their answers, when they come, will be published in full.]
