Nigeria’s dead capital economy where the land can’t feed the nation

Land reform is a consequential political struggle, often disguised as a mere administrative exercise. But land is memory, status and inheritance, combined; land is power and it is sacred.

In a country where the state feels distant, a small family holding is not simply an asset; it is a livelihood, an identity, sometimes the difference between dignity and desperation, where disputes over land can quickly harden into life and death fights.

Because land is so foundational, Nigeria’s current reality should unsettle everyone.  Public land conversation treats titles and registries as the sole preoccupation of property lawyers and urban developers.  Meanwhile, the nation is sliding into a food emergency that has become too large to explain away as “temporary hardship.”

Institutional defects are daily constraints on farmers’ behaviour.  If the claim to land is largely social, and validated by a community head, a lineage, or a neighbour’s witness, you may feel secure in ordinary times,  and remain exposed in extraordinary times when conflict, urban expansion, elite land grabs, or a state project  arrives, with bulldozers and a thin paper trail.

A few years ago, the UN warned that record inflation, climate shocks and insecurity could push the number of food-insecure Nigerians to 33 million by last year, a sharp rise from 25 million people who previously needed assistance. The country can no longer afford for land, its main productive asset, to remain largely unprofitable, economically.

Economist Hernando de Soto provides the right label for the problem Nigeria currently faces. He calls it dead capital, arguing that land and buildings in many developing countries serve immediate physical purposes, but cannot “lead a parallel life as capital”.  They cannot serve as viable collateral except in few urban spots.  To put differently, value exists, but the legal procedure to mobilise it does not, because converting assets into capital depends on a complex, accessible, enforceable formal property system.

Dead capital is equal to dead time: years lost to disputes, overlapping claims, and the constant fear that the ground beneath a family’s livelihood is negotiable.  In that environment, rational farmers choose low-risk, low-return strategies; minimal fixed investment, limited mechanisation, and incremental improvements that can be abandoned if tenure is challenged.

The Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development has acknowledged that Nigeria’s property registration process is inefficient and that “less than 10%” of land is registered.  There is also the lack of a “systematic and credible” framework for identifying ownership and interests.  The ministry is proposing a national programme to formalise land transactions from less than 10% to over 50% in ten years, including building a National Digital Land Information System. BusinessDay reports the minister’s stated rationale more bluntly: to stem the growth of dead capital, estimated at $300 billion.

A strong land system does two practical things for agriculture. First, it gives the farmer a credible horizon. Second, it allows the farmer to pile investments like irrigation, tree crops, storage,  and soil improvement on the assumption that the future will not confiscate the returns.

A recent peer‑reviewed study reports that land titling in the agricultural system is low at just about 11.8%. The authors’ core mechanism is based on investment incentives created by perceived security, alongside complementary inputs like credit and mechanisation.

So, when most land remains outside formal documentation, Nigeria misses out on credit.  It misses out on the discipline and confidence that make credit productive. It also misses out on the basic informational infrastructure for modern agricultural planning: who is where, doing what, on what terms, with what disputes pending.

The dysfunction ripples outward.  Agro‑processors struggle to aggregate supply reliably. Insurers struggle to price risk.  State agencies struggle to target support without leakages. And rural Nigerians, especially women, tenants, and younger farmers pay an invisible premium, farming inside a system that cannot fully recognise them.

Land registration is food security policy, industrial policy, and social protection rolled into one. We cannot keep treating land titles as the last step of development. Land title is not merely a “real estate reform”; it is not something we do after we are rich.  In countries that got rich through agriculture-to-industry transitions, secure, legible land rights were part of how they became rich.

Nigeria must elevate systematic land titling and registration to a national productivity mission and move beyond boutique pilots to digitised land information as the backbone of modernisation.  This demands low-cost, high-trust pathways that recognise existing social claims rather than erasing them.

It must also slash discretionary choke points such as the unnecessary consents and delays that turn land into patronage rewarding connections over competence.  Such reforms would convert dead capital into active leverage, enabling secure investment horizons for farmers and reliable supply chains for processors.  Tie this formalisation directly to an agriculture package that scales prevention: extension services, storage infrastructure, irrigation, and off-take guarantees.

A nation does not drift into hunger in one dramatic fall. It slides, quietly, when its most basic systems stop converting effort into progress. Nigeria’s unregistered land is “dead capital”; it is also dead leverage – the leverage we need to feed ourselves, stabilise rural incomes, and give industry domestic inputs and demand. The work is hard, yes. But the cost of not doing it has already arrived at the dinner table.