Housing Deficit: Stakeholder Blames Land Acquisition Challenges

An estate surveyor in
Port Harcourt and major stakeholder in the housing sector, Stanley Owem, has identified difficulties in acquiring land as one of the factors responsible for the housing deficit in Nigeria.
He said that the Land Use Act of 1978, which should have been an instrument for addressing land ownership and titles, has turned out to be counterproductive.
Making this known in a chat with The Tide in Port Harcourt, at the weekend, Owen, who is also a member of the Nigerian Institute of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), said that problems encountered in the title transfer and registration in Nigeria could be traced to perceptible defects in the Land Use Act of 1978.
Owem stated that under the Act, only the governor of a state had the power to issue a Certificate of Occupancy, pointing out that 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 underscored the need to reduce the costs and bottlenecks in efforts to obtain title documents, stressing that the governor’s consent for transfer of title should not be more than one per cent of the value or cost of the property.
“The processing time for the title registration and governors’ consent should not be more than 15 days. The practice of asking for numerous supporting documents such as tax clearance, development levy, tenement rates, should be entirely removed as requirements for the processing of title transfer,” he stated. According to him, 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.