Effective Land Administration is Crucial to Housing Delivery

Nigeria will have a good system of housing delivery if the various agencies of government that deal in land documentation streamline their activities.

This was one of the outcomes of brainstorming by professionals at the 10th anniversary and the inauguration ceremony of the Nuel Mark Development, a real estate firm, which held in Port Harcourt, River state, recently.
Discussing ‘Integrated Land Administration and Mass Housing Development in the Niger Delta’, an Associate Professor of Land Management and Valuation, in Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Dr. Iyenemi Ibimina Kakulu said “Land governance involves a process of decision making in connection with access to land and land use that addresses conflicting interests of government and the governed.”
Kakulu said, “Constitutionally, every Nigerian citizen should have access to land within the confines of the country and such basic rights cannot be separated from human rights. Land is managed in the public interest but where the public becomes victim to land governance then transformation becomes necessary.”

She stated that good land administration system involves an extensive range of systems and processes in connection with land that are centrally managed. “These include: Guaranteed Ownership and Tenure Security; A robust land information system; Support land and Property Taxation and ability to provide security for credit facilities.
“Others are; ability to develop land markets.; Protective over State lands; Ability to reduce land disputes; Facilitate land reforms when necessary; Improve urban planning and infrastructure development; Support sound environmental management and ability to produce statistical data for planning.”
Guaranteed ownership and tenure security, she said were very important components of land administration which, from experience, have remained one of the failures of mass housing projects in Nigeria today.
“This dates back to the ‘Shagari low-income Houses’ built by the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing in several States which recorded very high default rates in the repayment of the Federal Mortgage Bank loans. Unfortunately, allottees who were disciplined enough to offset the loans fully are yet to obtain title to such properties decades later.

READ ALSO – Lagos Land Bureau Creates Help-Desk To Fast Track Treatment Of CofO Applications “The complexity of a process which should ordinarily have been simple and straight forward discourages people. 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.
According to her, 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 usually gets frustrated after taking a few steps and abandons the process altogether.”
Also expressing the cumbersomeness of the land documentation process, an estate surveyor, Adekunle Awolaja stated in his paper ‘Innovative Business Processes for Automated Land Administration in Nigeria’ that land administration in the country is plagued with a lot of issues that lead to non-effective and inefficient management of the country’s land resources.
“The promulgation of the Land Use Act, which came with the intendment of correcting the ills in land administration could not achieve its aim as a result of the traditional analog system of recording and operations,” he said.
However, he said with the modernisation and the need to come up to global best practices, the imperative of having an automated business processes in land administration became a necessity.

According to Awolaja, the importance of valuation in automation of land administration system cannot be overemphasised,
Speaking on the newly established foundation, Nuel Mark Development Foundation, the Lead Consultant and Head of Operation, Nuel Mark Group, Emmanuel Mark, an estate surveyor, stated that the Foundation intends to actively play its part towards realising an inclusive society.
Mark said the foundation would create a niche in housing and urban development; investment in policy research; promotion of an outstanding research institute, scientific journal publication outfit and an annual  summit as well as interests in water and environmental sanitation.

“Other areas that we would want to develop are capacity building for community water management; providing platform to mentor young children and encouraging creative writing, amongst others.
“I therefore note that the imperative for dynamic intervention in service delivery to meet the increasing demands of an ever plural society such as the economic empowerment of innovators, entrepreneurs and talented young people, in addition to addressing new opportunities and or make better use of resources became a new challenge for the organisation.”