Stakeholder Blames Land Acquisition For Poor Housing Supply

A stakeholder in the
building environment, Timothy Nubi, has identified difficulties in acquiring land as one of the major factors   responsible for the housing difficulties recorded across the country.
He said that the Land Use  Act  of 1978, which would have been an instrument for addressing land ownership and titles turned out to be counter-productive.
Nubi, a Quantity Surveyor by profession and member of the Nigerian Institution of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS) noted while interacting with The Tide in Port Harcourt that the problems being encountered in title transfer and registration in Nigeria could be traced to perceptible defect in the Land Use Act of 1978.
He noted that under the Act, only the governor of a state had the power to issue a certificate of occupancy (C of O).
“This would have been okay if not for the problem associated with time wastage,  expensive processing and endemic corruption which undermines property transaction and investment”, he said.
Nubi also underscored, the need to reduce the costs and bottlenecks in efforts to obtain title documents.
“The governor’s consent for transfer of title should not be more than one percent of the value or cost of property.
“The processing time for the title registration and governor’s consent should not be more than 15 days. The government should deploy more human, financial and technical resources to man the processing offices so as to reduce the level of corruption”, he said.

Corlins Walter