By Jude Njoku

Mr Bode Adediji

The 1978 Land Use Act which vested enormous powers on State Governors is anachronistic and anti-development. This view was canvassed by the President of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), Mr Bode Adediji.

Mr Adediji who recently led a team of the Institute’s executive council on a courtesy visit to the initiator of the controversial Act and former military and civilian President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo at his Abeokuta country home, explained that the former president offered reasons why the quickly signed the decree into law before handing over to the civilians in 1979.

Although, the NIESV President stated that the Land Use Act which uniformized land tenure system in the Northern and Southern parts of the country is not altogether a bad law, he faulted its implementation and the lack of political will to review some policies that exhibit certain problems.

He maintained that “a situation where two private companies and individuals would seek to borrow money and you have to go the Governor of a State to get his consent before you can mortgage your property is totally anachronistic and anti-development”.

“If a bank trusts me to be able to give me money and I am pledging my property in return, Government for God’s sake, has no business in that transaction. If at all it will have a business in it, it is in the area of documentation so that a fraudulent landlord does not pledge the same property before two banks. So, in terms of registration, okay, but in terms of consent to say Yes or No to what category of customers a bank should extend loans to in terms of mortgage facility, is totally unbelievable,” he said..

He called on the National Assembly to immediately review the Act. His words: “These areas of deficiency in the Land Use Act are known to the powers that be, especially members of the National Assembly, why has it taken them so long to make amendments to all these, when in the life of this nation, occasions have arisen in the past where they had to summon emergency to enact some fresh laws? What we are saying is this, the seriousness of any government in any country could be determined by the passion, attention and time devoted to look into all documents relating to the enabling environment for business opportunities. Once government has failed in that respect, what you will have are unemployment, kidnapping, crime, devaluation of the Naira and so on. I believe that any government that is serious, the first thing it should do is to look at the environment and say this is what we have seen that is not doing fine and we must fine-tune it”.

… Seeks partnership with AMCON

Mr Adediji who spoke to Vanguard Homes & Property on various burning issues affecting the real sector of the economy, sought a role for estate surveyors and valuers in the newly created Assets Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON).

“ When you are looking at about 1.3 trillion of toxic assets as announced by AMCON and that almost more than one quarter of these relate to land and buildings, then the profession that is squarely concerned with the management and disposal of physical property assets cannot sit on the fence. Our own central objective is to be able to partner with AMCON in the areas of identification, evaluation, management and disposal of all these underlining property assets (real estate) if the need arises.

He gave reasons for the recent retreat organised by NIESV at Abeokuta to look into the operations of AMCON. “You cannot engage or intervene on any issue for which you are not sufficiently educated. So, the primary purpose of the Abeokuta retreat was to educate our members concerning the challenges of a new body called AMCON. Secondly, we need to know what our professional experiences are concerning the current market situation because if AMCON just wakes up one day under a misinformed position that you can throw into the market thousands of properties following the law of demand and supply, the immediate consequence is that the value of these properties will be eroded. And once that happens, the basic goals and objectives of AMCON in taking away these properties from the banks in the first instance and warehouse them for sometime until the situation makes it possible for reasonable confidence to emerge and people are buying so that the entire value is not lost, would have been defeated. We need to tell AMCON about the modalities and parameters of identifying assets, valuing these assets and authenticating the value that the banks have put on them We have seen a situation where a bank will put a N100 million value on a property in a far place like Agege on a bungalow; a bungalow that is not worth more than N2 million or N3 million. So, it is important that as an independent arbiter, a professional body like NIESV must come up with our own independent position concerning re-verification of the quantity and value of all these toxic assets that AMCON has gone to retrieve from the banks”.

He also kicked against the exclusion of estate surveyors from the top management of the corporation.