New model underway to improve land title registration

By Marie-Therese Nanlong

The Plateau State government has disclosed the plan to improve the State’s internally generated revenue through the systematic land title registration model.

The State Commissioner for Lands, Survey and Town Planning, Peter Gai, said the effort will improve revenue because, without the model in place, the Ministry has, within eight months, generated almost N500 million and is making efforts to surpass the N700 million target for 2024 and hit N1 billion.

Gai lamented that in the history of Plateau, the State only has a record of 63,000 Certificates of Occupancies, CoF and the improved approach will ensure that at least the State records 500,000 CoF.

He commended the support received from the State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang, who has, within one year in office, signed 2,200 CoF against the 3,000 signed in eight years by his predecessor.

Speaking with journalists in Jos on Thursday, he stated that the Governor had given a 50% rebate on ground rent and urged citizens to seize the opportunity to comply before the grace elapses in January. 2025.   

Despite the successes he has recorded in office in the last year, he hinted his Ministry is still faced with the challenges of power supply, mobility, delay in the payment of processing fees, lack of harmonization of signatures of community leaders on sales agreements, the lack of relevant staff, among others which he and his team are working to address.

His words, “… I met infrastructural decay of offices and an un-updated GIS platform, low staff morale, leakages in revenue, low revenue generation, and we were operating manual and automated systems, and the manual moved faster than the automated.

“Our work required about 88 workflows. It took two to three years to obtain a Rights of Occupancies, R o O; some spent 15 years, so we established a monitoring and evaluation unit to ensure files move at the expected speed. This has reduced the time required to acquire land titles from several years to just two to three months.

“With the little effort we have put in within one year, we have signed 2,200 certificates of occupancies. It is a drop in the ocean, but on a comparative level, when you compare what the past administration did in eight years, the governor, for eight years, signed 3000 certificates of occupancies. Before this year ends, we will in a year achieve what the past administration achieved in eight years.”

He added, “In September 2023 when I came in, the Ministry generated ₦173 million between January and September 2023, but between January and August 2024, we have almost hit N500 million. Our target based on the budget is N700 million but we will surpass that mark, looking at N1bn…

“We want to start a project called systematic title registration. This has been implemented in some States, and it is time we key into it. This will require that those with inherited property without documents are captured for documentation. The number of properties registered with C o O is about 63,000 we intend to jack up the number to about N500,000…”