PROPERTY TRANSACTION GUIDE

‘It’s possible to get land within a week in Ogun State’
By AKINPELU DADA and ADEMOLA ONI

Punch, Monday, 16th Feb 2009

The Director-General, Bureau of Lands and Survey, Ogun State, Mr. Gbenga Ogunnoiki, speaks on the rate of development along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the recent increase in land charges and the strategies being put in place to ensure speedy processing of land in the state in this interview with AKINPELU DADA and ADEMOLA ONI. Excerpts.

The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway axis has generated a lot of interest in terms of land management and property development. What are the structures you have put in place to ensure that there is a controlled and orderly development?

Before the advent of the current administration in Ogun State, there had been a two- kilometre acquisition on either side of the expressway. There is a global acquisition stretching from Isheri to the Sagamu end along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. Also, there have been haphazard developments here and there before the inception of this administration in 2003. Immediately we came in, the governor, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, directed that there should be regional master plan for the state and we started adhering strictly to the regional plan as well as trying to do some urban renewal here and there, but you know that the government of Otunba Gbenga Daniel is a government that has human face.

Sometimes, when we want to do it the way we should do it, that is, clearing the shanties and slums, he will intervene and tell us that we should try as much as possible to create a win-win situation; he doesn’t want them to be displaced. But you see, it has come to a level that we have to leave politics alone and be professional and that is what we are doing. You can see what we did with the trailers at Ogere as well as Ibafo, though some of them are coming back. I can assure you that we are going to do what we have to do. And also the Kara Market traders, the rams and cow sellers, we have been having consultations with them and they are very reasonable. They told us that they knew that the place they are occupying does not belong to them; that they are just there on temporary basis.

The government has now allocated land and we are relocating them there because the huge capital outlay that is associated with this axis is so much. The whole area will soon be transformed into a highbrow residential outlay. We have just, we received a team from Shoprite and another from Mama Cass. On the other side of this place (Isheri) is where we have the Victoria Garden City. So, you can see that this place is wearing a new look and we have to make sure that we adhere strictly to regulations that will give this place a better outlook.

How do you ensure control?

We have the Monitoring Unit as well as the taxation unit with policemen and other security operatives going round everyday to make sure that regulations are strictly adhered to.

Many people are worried that the government is not moving fast enough to put infrastructure in place in the area to enable them move in and develop. What assurances are you giving on this?

Ask them how much they paid for land and they will tell you it is such a paltry amount. When they were paying the money, we told them that government was going to introduce some special levies. Just five minutes away from here at Berger, Omole and Magodo in Lagos, a plot of land is being sold for between N40m and N50m. We collected N1.5m here, that is too paltry and this is not Akowonjo or Egbeda. It is not Ifo, this is a mega city and if you are paying N1.5m for land and government is telling you that with the kind of infrastructure we are bringing here, you need to pay more money, I think they should feel obliged to pay because they all know how much they pay for land in Magodo or Omole.

The River View Estate is the estate to be now; we are not going to give it for less. It is going to have the entire infrastructure in place. It is going to have side-walk and streetlight, name it; everything is going to work at River View Estate. This is coupled with the fact that we are doing grading of roads and channelisation of the water body in the estate. I think people should be ready. We are dredging the Opa Aro River here to the Majidun end in Lagos. This will take a lot of money. If people are ready to move here, they should be ready to pay for the services we are rendering.

Have you communicated the new charges to the allottees and what has been their reaction?

We have been sensitising them through the media, and many of them have been responding very positively. You can see many people here at our Isheri office. That shows that all of them want to partner with the government in development. It is not like we are just taking money. How much did they pay? The government did not say their money has gone down the drain; we are not even revoking the land. We are only telling them that if you have developed, that’s your luck and if you have not developed, we will relocate you to the back. We will give the land in the front to the people who are ready to develop now and they have the option of taking their money back.

Concerning the dredging of Opa Aro River, what is the scope and the mode of financing it?

We have dredged in the past. We divided River View Estate into areas one, two; three and four. We used area one as a test case; that is where you have Compass newspapers. During the last rain, there was no water there, it was very dry. What did we do? We erected something we call dykes or control walls. These walls were erected to control water. We built some small bridges, which we called box culverts. We have about 13 of the box culverts and then we started dredging. Now, we are doing intensive dredging. These intensive dredging is to channelise whatever volume of water that is coming in so that it can be re-aligned with the Majidun River. That is what we are doing right now. It is Y-shaped; one batch comes like this, another like that and they are all draining into the Majidun River. So, if Lagos State could do its own, we will do ours. It is very expensive. You remember you asked the question, where are we getting the funds from? We are getting these funds from the private sector, from the banks. We need to pay this money back! That is what has precipitated the Special Infrastructural Levy as well as Neighbourhood Improvement Charge. If people want good services, they must be ready to pay for them, which is what obtains abroad; this is what we are bringing here.

Referring to the SIL and the NIC, for someone who bought a plot of land for N1.5m some months back, what is he likely to pay now; so that he can begin to make arrangements for the new levy?

We are bringing all that out next (this) week. It is going to be in the newspapers and it will cover all the state. We have consultants working on what they should pay. We don’t want to make it too exorbitant. We want it to be very reasonable and that is why we are rationalising the payment, but I can assure you that it will affect those who live in Ojodu, in Abeokuta, in Sagamu. It is not peculiar to River View Estate alone. We are extending infrastructure everywhere. Even the NIC, the property developers are going to pay that. When the neighbouring states are doing all these, no one will say anything. If it is Ogun State, you will say it is political. It is not political; we want to bring dividends of democracy to our people. Oshodi was cleared, nobody said anything. We want to clear Ibafo; we want to clear Kara Market; we want the express road to be what it is all over the world, an express road. That is what is going to happen. Sometimes, when we take these things to the Executive Council meeting, the governor would rationalise that we should not make life too difficult for the people. That is the hallmark of a wonderful leader.

You talk about special infrastructure levy and all that. How soon do we expect to have enough infrastructure there for people to move in and start developing?

We have started. Right now, you are interviewing me at our zonal office in Isheri. The general idea is to sit here one or twice a week instead of bringing people to Abeokuta; I want to meet them halfway. I prefer to meet them at the zonal office to attend to their problems and ensure that those things we said would be done are being done. Right now, I have met with our engineers and they have gone to site. The dredgers have gone to site; we are expecting the dredging machine right now. If I’m here, I will be able to ensure that these things are done properly.

Until you people see clearing, you wouldn’t know that we have started work. Surveyors have gone to site; we have beeninside the swamp; we have done the alignment survey. Right now, some engineers are designing bridges; designing the road; you wouldn’t know that government is spending so much money on consultancy and other arrangements. We have done extensive soil test, we have prepared road maps and alignment details. Two engineering companies are working on these things. One is doing the bridge, while the other is doing the road alignment. We want to take advantage of this dry season to do a lot of things.

There is a major problem associated with this area; the issue of traffic congestion. Once there is a little problem on this road, it becomes almost impassable. What plan do you have to solve the problem in collaboration with the Federal Government?

Of course, there is a collaboration between the state government and the Federal Government; even with the local government too. Of course, you know the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is being extended and of course, the state government is thinking about an East-West axis road so that if traffic is not concentrated on this longitudinal axis of Lagos-Ibadan, people can branch off the road and join at another end. Another one is the road from Ojodu that is cutting across the green belt and is dropping on the expressway. We are also thinking of accessing the Konigbagbe/Ogijo/Ikorodu axis. All of these will be a public-private partnership arrangement and of course, we are going to toll the roads. You have to realise that the cost of funding these projects is high when banks are asking you to pay 22 or 24 per cent as interest. That is why our people must know that to enjoy good things, they have to pay for them and they have to pay their taxes too.

How will you assess the effectiveness of the regulations guiding the use of land, especially on this stretch of the expressway?

When you are talking about regulations, I think the principal one is the Land Use Act, which vests all the land, especially in urban areas and their environs on the governor. One advantage that it gives you is that it has led to the demystification of land allocation. Because we operate an open door policy here and the people have direct access to me, you can see so many people are waiting to see me; and that means they have direct access to the governor, by extension and direct access to land. I will say that in the case of Ogun State, land allocation is moving at geometric progression, while land itself is static, that is arithmetic progression.

So, it means that the speed of acquiring land is almost catching up with land itself. The development is moving very fast in the state and we are ready. That is why as soon as people come for investment purposes, be it residential, commercial or institutional, we are ready to meet them and give them land. It is possible for you to obtain land within a week and start building in Ogun State. Many of these people who parade themselves as investors are really land speculators. The governor is just not ready to take that; if you are not going to develop the land, don’t come near our land, but for you to hold land in trust and say ‘in four, five years time I will resell’; we don’t have that type of land in Ogun State, and we are shunning land speculation here. So, for real, serious investors, we are creating an enabling environment for development.

Land management in Nigeria in most cases is manual; people get to the Land Registry and discover that people’s files are missing. What are you doing to correct this situation in Ogun State?

When we first got here, everything was manual as you said. We were connecting surveys to survey control local origins when other people had moved to the Nigerian Origin and Universal Transverse Mercatol. When people have moved to these systems all over the world we were still on local origin. These were the things that I corrected when I came; so, all our survey plans are tied to UTM. Also, we now use digital instruments as against digital instruments that we inherited. We have also computerised all our operations. We also have a Geographic Information System Centre, which is fully operational in our office in Abeokuta, while we are making arrangement to link this zonal office in Isheri to our GIS centre. If you come here for a transaction and you bring a document, we simply need to scan the document and send it to Abeokuta; we will attend to it in Abeokuta and send it back here.

So, it is going to be a full fledged computerised zonal office at Isheri here. We are also doing real time business on the net. Our people in the Diaspora can easily access land; they can print out our form from our website, www.ogunlands.com. We equally have something we call site mapping where you can access Ijebu Ode from the United Kingdom; you can start navigating, seeing the Awujale’s palace and other interesting places in the town and other towns in the state. By the time we attract all these automobile industries to this axis and we give them a CD of this site mapper, you will realise that we can use motor navigator once you get to Ogun State. We have used GIS to produce street maps to aid tourism. We have completed the street maps of Abeokuta, Sagamu, Ota, Ilaro and Ijebu Ode.

Right now, we have captured about 4,500 data; that is all the manual files we inherited from the Old Western Region Government and the old ones in Ogun State; we have people who are putting them in the system. By the time we complete capturing these files, they would be useful for budgetary purposes. There are hamlets you don’t even know exist. We have the capabilities of generating aerial maps and satellite images, where you can see a very remote hamlet and the government can use this to plan on the scope of infrastructure to be provided for specific areas. You can see that we have re-positioned Ogun State on the map of the world as one of the most computerised states in the world.

What advice will you give to investors to avoid falling into the hands of land speculators?

We are moving closer to the door steps of investors. This Isheri zonal office is just about 10 minutes from Lagos. So, that means we can attend to peoples’ problems here. We have zonal offices in Ota, Sagamu, Ijebu Ode, even another one in Abeokuta, Ilaro and other places so that we can meet them at the point of their needs. So, I’m just imploring investors to get across to us or log on to our website.