Checking the drudgery of property registration in Nigeria
One clear indicator of a business friendly environment is the ease of acquiring and perfecting property titles. In Nigeria, registering property titles is not only a cumbersome and perplexing process, but one that is financially demanding.
Despite recent improvements and innovations in terms of technology that have been introduced in land administration in some parts of Nigeria, the whole process is still lacking in speed and convenience. Nigeria lags behind countries like Ghana, South Africa, Thailand and New Zealand in ease of registering property. The World Bank regards Nigeria as one country with a difficult property registering process.
Registering a property in Nigeria takes an average of 12 procedures, lasts nearly four months (except in some states like Lagos, Kano and Ogun which have improved on this) and costs about 15 percent of the property value as against neighbouring Ghana, where it requires just five procedures, 34 days and 1.3 percent of the property value.
In New Zealand, property could be registered online in two days at a cost of 0.1 percent of property value, while in Thailand registering property requires just one step, less than a day and 1 per cent of property value.
Quoting a World Bank report on Doing Business in Nigeria which showed Nigeria as one of the world’s most difficult places to register property, Olubode hinted that in Thailand, registering property requires just one step, less than a day and 1 percent of property value. In South Africa, depending on the size and value of the property, it takes between one and two months to perfect land title documents, explaining that it takes one day and zero percent cost to register a property valued at R0 – 600,000, and 3 percent for a property valued at R600,001 – R1.000,000.
When one considers other un-friendly indicators in the Nigerian business environment like power supply challenges and huge cost of powering businesses, and high lending interest regime, it appears that doing business in Nigeria is like mountain climbing. Many desire to start off, only some eventually start, and just a minute few succeed in overcoming.
We urge relevant government authorities to learn from countries where acquiring property titles are much more convenient and check the needless tiresome and expensive process of property registrations in order to encourage property acquisition for productive enterprise.