Managing Director, Ideal Habitat Initiative, Prof. Timothy Nubi, has said the inability to access land and land titles were the fundamental factor responsible for mass poverty, especially in the developing world.
Prof Nubi, told newsmen in Lagos on Monday that “It has been established beyond reasonable doubt that poverty is directly related to the problem of access to land and the process of title registration.”
He said that the Land Use Act of 1978, which should have been an instrument of resolving land ownership and title, turned out to be a cog in the wheel of developmental progress.
According to him, whatever problem that has been experienced with title transfer and registration in Nigeria can be traced to the imperfection in the underlining enactment of the Land Use Act of 1978.
The managing director said that under the Act, only the governor of the state could issue a Certificate of Occupancy as an evidence and titular land titles for duration of 99 years.
“Also, the owner of such Certificate of Occupancy must seek and obtain the consent of the state governor in matters of alienation, mortgage and sublease.
“This would have been okay if not for the problems associated with time wastage, expensive processing and endemic corruption which undermines property transaction and investment,’’ he said.
Prof Nubi said the importance of having a title document on one’s property could not be over-emphasised, adding that at individual level, people were unable to create wealth from their land assets.
“At the state level, the revenue that should accrue from ground rent receipts is lost due to the fact that the bulk of the land is not covered by registered title and is unknown to the state,” he said.
He said to reduce the bottleneck, first and foremost, it was unnecessary to have to obtain governor’s consent for mortgage transaction.
“Governor’s consent for transfer of title should not be more than 1 per cent of the value or cost of the property while “The processing time for title registration and governor’s consent should not be more than 15 days,” he said.
Prof Nubi also suggested that the bureaucracy that had been a major bane of title processing should be dismantled through complete decentralisation.
“The practice of demanding for numerous supporting documents such as tax clearance, development levy, tenement rates, should be entirely removed as a requirement for the processing of title transfer.
“Government should also deploy more human, financial and technical resources to man the processing offices so as to curtail bureaucracy and reduce the level of corruption associated with it,’’ he said.