Expunge land use act from statute books, says lawyer

The immediate past Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Akwa Ibom, Uwemedimo Nwoko, has called for the removal of the Land Use Act from the statutes book in Nigeria.

Agreeing that the purpose of the enactment of the law was “to protect government from the difficulty of acquiring lands for developmental purposes”, he said that “it has no business being in our statute book”.

He said that deliberation on the existence of the Land Use Act was not allow to pass through the then Constitutional Conference that gave rise to 1979 Constitution, adding that the law “would never had pass through any civilian parliament in the whole world, had it not been that a military degree imposed it on the Nigerian people.”

“The making of Land Use Act was more like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly,” he said, adding that government could have looked at a more civilized and conducive way of addressing the challenges of land acquisition for developmental purposes.

According to him, it is the Land Use Act that has stretched the issue of ownership of oil minerals and other minerals. “It ought not to be so and we in the Niger Delta are suffering gross injustice because of the Land Use Act,”he declared.