Economic need for land reform
An attempt to underscore the importance of land for both economic and social purposes amounts to reinventing the Tower of Babel. As a factor of production, land is the most unique and most strategic of all the other factors including capital, labour and enterprise. Its availability plays a pivotal role in the development of any economy and the increase in investment inflow.
Industrialisation, housing development, agriculture, mining, oil exploration and other economic and productive activities that lead to improved standard of living, job creation, economic growth among others are possible only when land is available and harnessed for such purposes.
For this reason alone, the current plan by the Federal Government, under the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, to carry out an audit and inventory of government’s landed property to free same for both housing and other economic activities should be pursued with renewed vigour.
A World Bank Report on ‘How Africa Can Transform Land Tenure, Revolutionise Agriculture, and End Poverty’ notes that Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly half of the world’s usable, uncultivated land but so far the continent has not been able to develop these unused tracts, estimated at more than 202 million hectares, to dramatically reduce poverty and boost growth, jobs, and shared prosperity.
This observation made by the global bank re-echoes the lame attempt and, ultimately, the failure of Nigeria’s Land Use Act which was promulgated by the Military Government under Olusegun Obasanjo in 1978.
The act which vested ownership of all land in a state on the governor, meaning that the governor holds it in trust for the people, also gives them power to allot and revoke land at will and this has been blamed for the country’s seemingly insurmountable housing and other problems.
Another report by the World Bank titled ‘Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity’ suggests that African countries and their communities could effectively end ‘land grabs,’ grow significantly more food across the region, and transform their development prospects if they can modernize the complex governance procedures that govern land ownership and management over the next decade, adding that Africa has the highest poverty rate in the world with 47.5 percent of the population living below US $1.25 a day.
We can’t agree more, just as we also align with the view that Nigeria’s Land Use Act, which is today a constitutional issue, should be excised from the constitution for thorough review. We equally share the view of Fortune Ebie, former chairman of Federal Housing Authority ( FHA), that the review of the Act is the only way to solve the issue of the governor’s consent that tends to be punitive on developers and other investors requiring land to set up their businesses.
“Despite abundant land and mineral wealth, Africa remains poor,” the World Bank report notes , advising that “improving land governance is vital for achieving rapid economic growth and translating it into significantly less poverty and more opportunity for Africans, including women who make up 70 percent of Africa’s farmers yet are locked out of land ownership due to customary laws”.
The report notes that more than 90 percent of Africa’s rural land is undocumented, and in Nigeria, especially in big cities like Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, ridiculously high land charges have made land documentation difficult, making such land highly vulnerable to land grabbing and expropriation with poor compensation.
We are in agreement with the suggestion that by ‘Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity’, there should be an action plan by governments to revolutionize agricultural production, end land grabbing, and eradicate extreme poverty in Africa.
We recall that the Federal Government under late Musa Yar’Adua initiated what it called a holistic land reform which, regrettably, ended at the middle of no-where. That initiative needs to be revisited.
In our opinion, just as the World Bank also pointed out, African governments should champion reforms and investments to document all communal lands and prime lands that are individually owned, and regularize tenure rights of squatters on public land in urban slums that are home to 60 percent of urban dwellers in the continent.
They should also tackle weak governance and corruption endemic to the land governance system in many African countries which often favour the status quo and harm the interests of poor people, and muster political will to mobilize behind these land reforms and attract the political and financial buy-in of the international development community.