Real estate professionals and sundry stakeholders have expressed divergent views on the impact the Land Use Act has made on land administration in Nigeria 40 years after the Act was enacted by the then military administration under Olusegun Obasanjo, precisely on March 29, 1978.
While some of the professionals say the Act has performed so badly that it is the reason for all the pitfalls in real estate investment and the sector’s slow growth, others insist that the land law is the best thing to happen to land administration in the country.
“I don’t support the abrogation of the Act which many people have called for over the years,” Olufemi Babalola, CEO, Gravitas Investment Limited, the developers of Gracefield Island in Lekki, Lagos, said.
He recalled that before the Act, there was the communal land ownership system which, he explained, stifled development in real estate, agriculture, industrial concerns, etc, pointing that the use of a parcel of land for any of these purposes could be stalled if there is just one dissenting voice among the native owners.
“The Land Use Decree, which later became an Act, was promulgated to take care of situations like this and so rested ownership of the land on the state governors who hold the land in trust for the people”, Babalola explained, adding, “but because some of the governors are lazy and un-resourceful, a lot of things have gone wrong with the Act.
Continuing, he said, “the law created a central land registry; it created a good land administration, but the governors are lazy. So, it is not the law that is bad, but the operators that make it look as if it is bad”.
But Chudi Ubosi, an estate surveyor and valuer, reasons differently. According to him, though the objectives of the Act were, no doubt, lofty and well-intentioned, it has turned out to be defective in many respects, contending that “the time for its review in tune with current realities is long overdue.”
Quoting a data from the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business 2017, Ubosi pointed out that as a result of the provisions of the Act, property registration in Nigeria takes an average of 77 days to achieve as against 59.7 days in sub-Saharan Africa and 22.4 days in high income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
“Registering properties in sub-Saharan Africa in general and Nigeria in particular is evidently tough as demonstrated by the report”, he said, adding, at an average of 10.10 percent, Nigeria is among sub-Saharan Africa countries with the highest cost of registration as a percentage of property value; the average in sub-Saharan Africa is 8.00 percent and 4.20 percent in high income OECD countries.
MKO Balogun, GMD/CEO at Global Property & Facilities International Limited, stressed in an emailed response to our questions that one of the biggest problems around the Land Use Act is the process of acquiring the Certificate of Occupancy from the state governor or the president in the case of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in Abuja.
“As a result of the sensitivity of the document, it has given birth to high-level corruption in the ministry that processes the C of O. In other words, the process has suffered political and social abuse over the years”, he posited.
Balogun however pointed out that compared to the communal tenure system, the Act has some advantages which he listed as opportunity for land ownership by more people, rapid urbanisation of the country, and opportunity for foreign investment in real estate.
He added that there was open land transaction and development for the good of the people just as there was data about land and land administration by governments to aid development and economic management , meaning that “most states are doing geographic survey and automating land administration and utilization same for national planning and development”.
