CHALLENGES OF LAND USE ACT

INTRODUCTION

To address the pitfalls and many of the challenges associated with the Land Use Act of 1978, it has been argued that the country needs a ‘Land Adjudication Act’ (LAA) that would allow rights to be adjudicated and the parcel to be defined under the surveyors’ law.

Lynn Holstein, a land administration specialist in a paper titled ‘Land Reform in Nigeria: Some Lessons from International Experience in Systematic Adjudication and Registration’ at a dialogue on legitimizing Systematic land Titling and Registration in Nigeria by the Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform in Abuja submitted that SAR has been used to achieve a greater coverage of formal registered lands across nations in similar situations as Nigeria in the last 50 years.

He said countries like Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Philippines, Moldova, PDR Laos and Turkey have used sporadic registration to a great extent to cater for demands for secure titles, but in time they had to use SAR to address the realization that the greater majority of the nation’s properties were outside the formal system.

“An example of SAR comes from the Thailand Land Titling Project which is perhaps the best known SAR project that used the method from 1984‐2000 till date. Systematic adjudication and registration was undertaken on a village‐by‐village basis by teams from central and provincial offices with supervision from the provincial land offices. Systematic registration was used to produce and register over 12.4 million titles (over 700,000 per year) between 1984 and 1999, and at the same time in other areas, sporadic adjudication was used with about 10 million registered parcels produced. In 1984 Thailand had a total of about four million titled parcels registered; by 2000 this had risen to about 26.4 million parcels.”