Need for responsive land compensation rates

This is to commend the federal government, through the Federal Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development, for recently reviewing of rates of compensation arising from involuntary land acquisition.

Eighteen years late, it has, after being developed with support from the World Bank and the Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Programme (RAAMP), approved a new framework for fair and equitable compensation rates for crops and economic trees to ensure adequate recompense for persons affected by government projects.

Project-affected persons are to receive compensation that reflects current economic realities. For instance, under the revised rates for matured trees in the North Central zone, cashews increased from N2,000 per matured stand to N45,000 and N5.5 million per hectare.

Also, mango increased from N4,000 per matured stand to N105,000 and N13 million per hectare, cocoa increased from N3,000 per matured stand to N160,000 and N160 million per hectare.

This is the first time that government is responding to the yearnings of land owners that have been and those to be expropriated.

However, land compensation deals with issue of revocation of rights of occupancy. The legal provision for compensation is clear that once land is revoked, the head of claims, in accordance to the Land Use Act of 1978, are four in number, one, the land itself, has to be paid for.

Secondly, economic trees and crops on the land has to be paid for, three, developments on the land such as structures, at any stage of completion, has to be paid for, and fourthly, all abortive verified expenditures, e.g. reclamation works on the land, has to be paid for.

What the federal government has done is just to look at one, only economic trees and crops.

Land is paid for as a refund of the ground rent you have paid in the year of revocation, that is the value of the land. For structures, what you have is the depreciated replacement cost of the building, then the rate to be applied to value the structure is as shall be provided by the appropriate Land Officer of the state, who is an estate surveyor and valuer, it is not a market rate.

Government should make it possible for land compensation rate to henceforth respond to inflation, so what we need is not only periodic, but responsive rates of compensation that would respond to inflation and other economic factors.

In practice, it is the state governors that are empowered by the Land Use Act to revoke right of occupancy but now the rates are developed by the federal government, so how have the governors accepted these rates?

So, it is critical that unless the state governors approve the rates as applicable in their states, it may only be for lands acquired for federal projects.

Each state has its own rates, so this matter has to be tabled before the National Council of States for the state governments to equally adopt these new rates. 

Esv. Adamu Kasimu is an Abuja-based Estate Surveyor and Valuer