Only 3% of Nigeria’s land titled, says presidential committee

The Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform (PTCLR) yesterday disclosed that only three per cent of the entire land in the country has titles on them while 97 per cent of the land across the nation do not.

This was disclosed by the chairman of the PTCLR committee, Prof. Peter Adeniyi, in Akure, the Ondo State capital yesterday while speaking with journalists over the pilot test of the Systematic Land Titling and Registration embarked upon in Ondo and Kano states.

According to the chairman , the committee which was set up by the late president, Umaru Yar’Adua in 2011 was saddled with the responsibility of collaborating with state governments and offer technical assistance to embark on survey of the land in different states of the federation.

He said the committee took off with three local government areas in Ondo and Kano states for the pilot test, saying three local government areas were selected in Ondo State while two local government were chosen in Kano.

He listed the local government areas in Ondo State to include Akure South, Akure North and Ifedore, and said the pilot test was being supported by GEMS3, a development partner that had been assisting in the execution of the project. The chairman said that the actual demarcation of the land in the pilot local government areas started in 2013 disclosing that about 15,000 plots were covered in Ondo State and 4,000 in Kano State.

According to him, about 5,000 Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) will be ready for collection in Ondo State at the rate of N25,000 with an assurance that no fewer than 20,000 would be available by December for collection in the state.

Adeniyi who regretted that many families were being ravaged by poverty despite having abundant land that could be used to source for funds, said the programme was designed to empower the government and the people of the country. He noted that lack of registered titles on such land had prevented them from turning the lands to fortune.

He said, however, that the committee had developed regulations for the sector which had been presented to the National Economic Council to prevent people from engaging in arbitrariness on land matters.