Setback to landed property investment: Shagari low-income property owners yet to get C/O decades after

Land titles and deeds remain a major obstacle to landed property investment and financing in Nigeria, as those who bought houses from the Federal Government as far back as the Shehu Shagari era, decades ago, have yet to get certificates of occupancy (C/O).

This is as a university lecturer has berated state governments that derived joy in mass demolition of houses and built areas in the name of regulatory duties, saying what is destroyed would never be recovered.

These were the sad echoes from the inaugural lecture series of the Nuel Mark Development Foundation just launched in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, by Nuel Mark & Partners.

The guest lecturer, Ineyemi Ibimina Kakulu, associate professor of Land Management and Valuation, Rivers State University of Science and Technology (RSUST), said the situation was so bad that allottees of the ‘Shagari Low-Income Housing Scheme’ built by the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing in several states, who were disciplined enough to off-set the loans fully, were yet to obtain title to such properties decades later.

She said the complexity of a process, which should ordinarily have been simple and straight forward, discouraged people.

Another revelation: “There are several other instances where part-payment in anticipation of allocation of mass housing apartments are made and in the course of development, several upward reviews take place eventually depriving the original payers of ownership upon completion. This happened severally during the construction of the Federal Housing Authority Estate at Rumueme in Port Harcourt,” she said.

Kakulu insisted that security of any investment was usually not guaranteed without title registration, saying, “There is currently no specific timeframe for registering a property in Rivers State due to bureaucratic processes. Rather than operate an integrated process, an applicant has to undertake several unconnected processes and is usually frustrated after taking a few steps and would abandon the process altogether.”

Sadly, she stated, the response from government was usually to quickly paint such development with stop-work orders and notices without proffering any alternatives or creating a transparent process to facilitate the approval process. When a ‘stop-work’ order is served, that further reduces the housing supply to the masses.