Government should make land use act work for efficiency — Femi Falana

Human Right Lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN), has said Nigerian government needs to make land use act work for urban and regional planning law to work.

Falana said this during the Global Property Conference organised by the Founder of Gtext Holdings, Dr. Stephen Akintayo, recently, in Lagos.

According to the lawyer, of all the legal bottlenecks in Nigeria, housing problems are crucial, hence, the need for government to urgently make land use act work. “Right now it is not working, buyers of properties are tied down to the blackmail of ‘Omo onile’ and the rest of them, government must make people confident to invest in real estate.

“This will give people assurance that no one is going to harass them if they acquire property legitimately, but right now, it’s a bit frustrating, even when you have acquired your property and registered your title and want to build your house, some thugs will come that you have to pay for foundation, when you get to lintel level, you pay again, when you are going to roof your property, you pay again, it’s quite frustrating. These are areas the government can eliminate so that the cost of acquiring property can be cheap and affordable.”

Falana also revealed that a huge percentage of properties in Lagos are not registered and there is no country that can develop seriously without land documentation.

“This is very sad for the country. You can imagine, with all the enlightenment in Lagos and with all the efforts of government, a huge percentage of the land in Lagos are not registered, then imagine what happens in other states. Development of properties all over the world is a very lucrative sector. You need to have your contact, you need to make your contact, you need to study the environment and you need to go for loans where the interest rate is low, not a place like Nigeria. There is no way you can cope with about a 30 per cent interest rate.”

In his remark, the convener of the event, Dr. Stephen Akintayo, said the idea behind Global Property Conference is to tackle the challenges in real estate sector as it is going through a tough phase from legal to police case to government policies etc.

He said: “I believe strongly that if we want to get the Nigeria economy back on track and create jobs and boost the economy just like you see in UAE and America with over three trillion real estate industry, we can turn Nigerian economy around just with the real estate sector, but the bottleneck has to be removed.”