On Monday, Mallam Mohammed Bello, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, outlined the reasons why his administration has not been willing to carry on the custom of distributing plots of land for Nigerians to build their homes as his predecessors did.
The minister, who presented the Muhammadu Buhari administration’s FCT scorecard for 2015, explained that allocating and managing land was one of the most difficult tasks for the federal territory’s minister, and he was unwilling to allocate land that the allottee might not be able to access in two decades.
Abuja had since been given out by previous administrations and it does not make any sense to continue to allocate new plots with new infrastructure and access, a situation that makes the development of such plots almost impossible.
The minister said: “A number of people have mentioned about land. Actually, one of the most difficult assignments of an FCT minister is land matters. I spent a lot of time with my team trying to see how can enhance the situation with land but the reality is that land in Abuja is no longer going to be available and easy as it was 20 years ago when people were being invited to come and get land so that they could develop the city. There is no land in an area where you can develop and many of us have personal experiences where previous administrations allocated land in 20 years down the line you don’t even know where the land is and you cannot have access to it. So, we realized that a secondary market was just created with allocations made and people will just have pieces of paper and at the end of the day, nobody gets to build anything.
“The whole idea of land is for you to build and that is why we prefer to develop infrastructure and then provide access to the area to enable the allottees to build. What is really happening now is that the template of land allocation has to change. The system where you get land and you go in a greenfield with infrastructure and you build is no longer possible because all the areas in phases one to three have all been allocated before we came into office. So any new land allocation will be in phases four and five and infrastructure in some parts of phases one and two has not been completed. So it does not make sense for you to give people a false sense of hope that they have a piece of paper allocation for an area that will take them a lifetime to even get access to it.
“We are now encouraging the private sector to develop mass housing through direct mass housing allocation for them to put up buildings and then work out withoff-takerss and some of this is being done directly by the government through the cooperative societies of MDAs or by private sector companies and now through the land swap system where we open up totally new districts and then you allow private sector to develop and sell the buildings. It is something that has not been perfect but gradually we will get there,” Bello said.
