The Executive Secretary of the newly established, Borno Geographic Information Service, (BOGIS), Engineer Adam Bababe, said in this interview that the state has digitalised land administration to enhance housing development. He also spoke on other issues in the sector.
There are reports that hundreds of houses in the state will be demolished by your agency. What can you say about that?
This is not BOGIS decision per se, it is government’s policy towards curbing the menace of flooding. The houses were not built in authorized areas, they were built on waterways; they are not houses in layouts or communities known by government. You see, people look for cheap things within the community, so, they connive with local leaders and land dealers to buy these illegal lands during the dry season and sand fill them.
The moment the rainy season comes, the houses are prone to flooding and you see these people coming out to plead for assistance, when in real sense those houses were built on waterways and river areas.
The houses they are talking about were either built on waterways or streams or roads reservations. Surface water is something that flows naturally, you cannot stop it. During the planning of any layout, we try to allow roads, utilities, houses, common area reservation and stuff like that. We design layouts to have particular size of roads, and overnight, people decided to block them or sell them to somebody to build houses without knowing that it is going to be to the disadvantage of the entire community, because they have blocked the channel where water is supposed to flow.
The demolition exercise was not handled by this agency alone, it is a joint committee work involving ministry of environment, ministry of works and state environmental agency. BOGIS and the security agencies were involved.
Most of these illegal houses were erected in the past. Do you have a master plan showing which waterways and roads they have encroached on?
We have layout plans designed by government and there are over 200 layouts in the state. In the course of designing layouts, a master plan was developed in 1976 for Maiduguri and the state in general. So whatever the design of layout you are doing, you must align it to the master plan and towards town planning regulations.
Also, whether there is master plan or not, waterways are known to be waterways, whenever it overflows, everybody has to steer clear.
Apart from surface water flow in the wet season, most of the drainage systems in Maiduguri do not convey waste water to disposal points. As an agency in charge of the physical planning, what are you doing about that?
There are government agencies vested with the responsibility of urban planning development but within this agency there is now a town planning directorate and there is a development control unit, so we design layouts and ensure strict compliance.
The development control unit makes sure there is strict compliance but before the implementation aspects, we will draw the attention of owners and defaulters about the laws violated. When it is time for demolition, the urban planning board, which is a sister agency, swings into action. BOGIS does not mark illegal buildings for demolition, we advise the urban planning board.
The major demolitions we have undertaken together with the planning board have to do with the floods and roads reservation; there are locations where roads are sold out by land racketeers, and about 40 to 50 households have been evacuated because of floods; they return home after the rainy season.
Governor Babagana Umara Zulum visited the areas affected by floods and there were a lot of complaints from residents. And after physically assessing the situation, he directed that those illegal structures must give way for people to have a livelihood there and we went to do the technical and professional surveys.
Did you give the defaulters time to evacuate and did you provide any alternatives for them?
We have to be very careful in dealing with such things, in such situations; firstly, it was outright illegality, and as you know, in the face of the laws, ignorance is not an excuse. But we followed the normal processes and procedures laid down by the Land Use Act. We gave them the notices that were supposed to be given to them.
As illegal as it was, we gave normal notices. Where it was legally built, procedures must be followed. There were houses built on utility reservations such as water and electricity line. Automatically, there is no issue of construction there, you are supposed to be far away from power line and water lines. We tried to avoid compensations because if we compensate on illegality, we have created a bad precedence where people will now start to develop structures anywhere.
What does it take to certify a land, buy one or pay levy? What kinds of levies do you charge?
According to the Land Use Act of 1978, every citizen of Nigeria is entitled to a hectare of land anywhere in Nigeria based on availability. If government carves out a particular layout and designs 100 or 200 plots and you apply and get one, then you pay grant fee and government allocates that land to you. In the new application, you state the purpose for which you are applying, be it residential or commercial. You do not buy land from government, government allocates it to you because it is your statutory right as a citizen of Nigeria. Once a land is allocated to you, there are some binding agreements between you and the government. First, is annual ground rent which is also part of the land use act; you pay to the government annual ground rent for the term which the land was allocated to you. In residential layout, the term is 99 years and for commercial is 40 years. You are supposed to be paying annual ground rent every January, not on demand. Now in Borno State, it used to be N1 for the past 20 years per square metre.
We had to come to the practical reality because, something you bought for N1, 20 or 30 years ago cannot be at the same cost. We felt it was important to look at our IGR and how to improve it.
The current administration’s 10 points agenda is very ambitious and intends to touch the lives of everybody in the state but the resources are not there. Thus, we reviewed the rent and we segmented it into three zones, where we have low, medium and high density areas.
The high density was not reviewed upward, we left it at N1 per square metre. For the medium density, we reviewed it to N2 per square metre and low density to N3 per square metre. If a standard plot is 450 square metre; in the low density you pay N1,350 per annum, in medium density you pay N900 and high in density you pay N450 per annum.
Some people have obtained lands and built houses. At what cost will they get certificate?
The defunct Ministry of Land and Survey used to operate manual filing system in communications and revenue generation. With the coming of this agency, we have tried to computerise everything; payment, application and filling are now electronic. We are trying to sanitize the internal system and once the staff get used to electronic system and the process gets adjusted, the public will apply for services from the comfort of their houses. We are trying to perfect the system so that you can do business with us online from anywhere.
There are allegations that officials connive with land racketeers on shady deals. What is your take on this?
The defunct ministry had a lot of bad elements that connived with land racketeers, local village heads to do a lot of shady deals but with the coming of BOGIS, we try to mitigate that, with our three-point transformation agenda. I want to ensure transparency and fight corruption and enforce electronic payment system. The first thing we did was to avoid physical contact with cash and we shifted to online payments.
All the payments go to TSA system and that is one example of it. If to say there is physical movement of files as done before, it would be tantamount to corruption but with the electronic system, you cannot blackmail anybody or hold files unnecessarily.
Secondly, we try to improve the staff welfare; we send them to workshops and conferences and their leave allowances are paid regularly while promotions are given attention. We renovated all the offices and provided working instruments including drones, cameras, survey systems and electrical appliances as well as field vehicles.
With regard to village heads, we visited His Royal Highness, Shehu of Borno and notified him about their connivance with land vendors to sell land to individuals and he gave us 100% support and asked us to work with district heads which we have done and we have seen great results because some ward heads were dethroned because of such activities and it is yielding positive results. We have met with the vendors and enlightened them about land procedures. If somebody wants to buy a land, you come and do search to ascertain the owner, when it was allocated, its number, when the owner paid ground rent, whether it is being developed or not and if there are legal issues on it. If you sell land to Mr A and you did not come to us for change of ownership, before the law, the former owner still owns the land and that is why there are lot of confusions.
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