Estate Developer Proffers Solution to Land Ownership Conflicts in Rivers
From ERIC MOORE, Port Harcourt
A Port Harcourt-based real estate developer and Mayor of Housing, My-ACE China, has expressed concerns about the seeming deteriorating state of conflict and land grabbing in Rivers State.
The investor has thus given tips on how the state can come out of land crisis with the use of technology in management of land administration by returning to the Rivers State Geographical Information System (RivGIS).
The investor and land developer who told the Sun that he rather goes where others are running from, admitted that land issues are actually a big problem; and that this has made it impossible for investors to come to the state.
He, however, said: “But for me, where others are running away from is where I run to. That is my nature. If you are able to crack that thing chasing others away, you will capture the right to scale. That is why I keep hammering on RivGis.”
The Mayor of Housing made it clear that the Land Use Act gave every governor the right on every land in that state.
China continued: “The aboriginal owners of the land are first owners; the next are the traditional rulers of that area. When RivGis wants to map land in say Alesa, they know the boundaries of Alesa and the surveyor will map the original land and make sure everybody’s land is registered in the system.
“If the government wants to use the land any day, they already know who and who are the original owners of the land and pay them off through the land committee they set up from that community. The government will now tell the community, look, these are the buyers. They are now the real owners of this land.”
He said government would then paste the names of the owners of the land on the town hall walls and ask anybody who has land there but did not see their names to come to a place.
According to him, “The government did not do that in this Alesa issue. When I came as a developer, I ought to go to RivGis first. For instance, I intend to build a highbrow sustainable city estate in Alesa. They will say, oh, if it’s highbrow, this is where we have provided for such a thing. If it is low-cost, it has to be in this area.
“I do not need to go to the community because RivGis would have already paid them. RivGis can now advise me that when you get to that community, give so, so type of jobs to the people, etc. I can now have a soft MoU with the community.”
Mayor of Housing admitted that land grabbing is a big menace in Rivers State, saying this was because there is no existing system.
He said: “My people have a saying that crisis is an opportunity for fraudulent people to exploit. When there is crisis, things are not organized, fraudulent people take advantage.
“Do you know that in this state (Rivers), people sell one land to over three buyers? This is because there is no system to track land transactions in the state. Nobody knows who owns the land and who buys. If RivGis had been made to work, these things would be a thing of the past. All you needed was to go to RivGis, confirm who owns the land, pay, and come back to RivGis to do documentation.”
The investor disclosed that the crisis in some states in the South-South, especially Rivers and Bayelsa States, had caused capital flight.
“The hard truth that may shock you is that over 70 percent of those who buy property in Abuja and Lagos are from Rivers and Bayelsa (South-South). I know one of the biggest developers building estates in Lagos and Abuja. I came here and asked him why he was not building here; he said he was not ready for the headache.
“This has caused capital flight. If you track the size or amount of capital leaving this zone, it is astronomical, just because this place is not organized. Capital seeks organized societies to work.”