40 families get certificates of occupancy in Lagos

AGER to bring sanity to land administration, especially payment of compensation on excised land in Lagos, the state authorities last week, presented Certificates of Occupancy to representatives of land owning families of 40 excised villages.

Governor Babatunde Fashola, who spoke at the Lagos House, Ikeja at the presentation said government decided to hold the meeting because excision issue had dragged for a while in the State and that the present administration was determined to bring such matters to a close as far as it relates to payment of compensation.

“This compensation issues have taken a while, so it is important for all of us to understand ourselves. What you people should have received might be money for acquisition that took place for example, more than 30, 40 years ago. However, I decided that instead of giving you money which is not enough, we would give you some land as compensation, which is the story of excision”, he said, adding that one of the things which the administration was trying to achieve by this process now was to put a stop to the practice whereby some people, after receiving excision, they would come back to say it was not enough or jumped unto government land.

On the issue of development, the Governor said some of the problems that the present administration faced in its early days, precisely in 2007 included heavy flooding caused by those who were selling land indiscriminately without any layout plan.

He maintained that as a result of the haphazard manner of planning and development of structures, especially, on the drainage alignment, government is now insisting that for anyone to even get the certificate of occupancy after the survey and every other requirement, there must be a layout plan.
“Let us layout the road, we want to know where the drainage is so that you don’t sell road and you think you have sold land for people to build on because with that you have created a slum, forgetting that such land does not have a value”, he said.

The Governor also stated that when a layout plan is produced, it is possible to separate residential buildings from business buildings and separate religious land from residential so that there won’t be complaints that loudspeaker from religious outfits, thereby constituting noise pollution, or other inconveniences.
“When you get the land, the first thing to do is to reserve space for road instead and not to occupy the entire space. That is why our roads are never straight and that is why when we have to do roads, we start demolishing houses. But if we take out enough land for the roads which everybody is going to use on the layout and ensure that nobody builds there, we would all live well in that community”, he noted.

Speaking earlier, the Permanent Secretary, Lands Bureau, Mr. Hakeem Muri-Okunola stated that since the signing of a “2009 Executive Order” that spells out necessary steps in the processing of excisions by applicants, hundreds of applications on have been forwarded to the technical committee on excision from all the five divisions of the State.

He said to date the Committee has inspected 414 community and family lands in all divisions of the State with 230 applications that had received Governor’s approval.