For decades, buying property in
Nigeria has been a risky investment. Land records, when they existed, were
paper documents manually filed in a faraway building whose employees might or
might not have had the training to keep the archives straight.
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Homeowners in Lagos, Nigeria take
to painting "this house is not for sale" signs
on their walls to ward off fake
real estate agents that try to sell homes to multiple
buyers without prior knowledge of
homeowners.
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Stories abounded of fake real estate
agents selling homes to multiple buyers while the homeowner was on vacation —
so much so that desperate owners began spray painting warnings on their
property walls that read, “this house not for sale.”
Nigeria’s economy is booming, driven
by oil and natural resources, but the absence of clear land laws have been
undermining development, blocking access to finance, and leaving state
governments without the revenues that should come from property tax.
“It’s been dysfunctional for many
years,” said Nigel Edmead, a land administration specialist who serves as
Thomson Reuters’s director of training and documentation. “There have been
transfers of land without recording, so no one knows who the real owner is.
Someone may have registered a sale in 1970 but it’s been sold 15 times since
then without record of the sales. The paper-based registry has lost connection
with the reality on the ground.”
In 2009, the Nigerian state of Cross
River sought to clean up its land registry mess, passing land reforms that
created the Cross River Geographical Information Agency, an independent entity
charged with setting up digital land records and making them accessible to the
public. Initial results appear good: In the first two months of 2013, the
amount the government collected in land rents and fees equaled the amount it
had collected in the four previous years — a sign that people trusted the new
system enough to register their land.
Nigerian officials are optimistic.
“Ultimately, the entire state — every
inch and every parcel of land — will be documented and registered,” Bassey
Oqua, the Cross River commissioner for special projects, predicted in an
interview with Thomson Reuters.
Transparent land deals are critical to
development in countries that are struggling to move out of poverty,
international development experts say. Without clear and verifiable land
transactions — and public access to information about sales — investment is
stymied and deals are vulnerable to corruption. Those who own or use the land
are often at risk of losing it to shady buyers or to large companies that are
after the land’s natural resources.
Nigeria is a particularly bad case.
The country ranked 180th out of 183 in a World Bank
2012 report titled, “Doing Business in a More Transparent Way,” which compared
the ease of registering property in different countries, among other
indicators. Others at the bottom of the list included the Marshall Islands,
Micronesia and Timor-Leste. According to the report, sub-Saharan African had
the weakest legal institutions overseeing property rights and more complex and
expensive regulatory processes for registering land.
Ensuring transparency gets all the
more complicated in countries where land is communal and recognition of who
owns what is mainly oral. The lack of formal land rights makes these places
especially vulnerable to large-scale land acquisitions, often derided as “land
grabs,” which have been on the rise in Africa and other parts of the world as
investors seek cheap land for food, forestry products and resources such as
ore.
In these cases, it’s critical to
include local populations who lay customary claim to the land or to the
resources on it, such as wood, international development experts say.
“If the details of a project aren’t
disclosed, then people who have those kind of rights are going to find it
exceedingly difficult to assert them,” said Darryl Vhugen, director of special
initiatives at Landesa,
a group that is working to expand land rights to the rural poor. “Once the
tractors come and the fences are put up, it’s pretty much too late.”
The International Land Coalition, a
global alliance of organizations that promote secure access to land for the
poor, has developed a “land matrix” that shows how prevalent large-scale land
acquisitions have been across the globe. It compiled data on 830 concluded land
deals, 181 that it says investors intend to pursue, and 71 that have failed.
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,”
said Mike Taylor, program manager of global policy and Africa at the
International Land Coalition.
So far, the matrix has logged land
acquisitions for projects in tourism, infrastructure and agriculture only — not
forestry or extractives, Taylor said, because the latter two often do not
involve the displacement of indigenous populations. The land coalition works
with partners to track acquisitions for inclusion in the matrix and welcomes
input from locals in target countries, he said.
According to the matrix, the United
States, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates are the largest transnational
investors, but the top 10 also include Saudi Arabia and China, whose
investments include large-scale agriculture production for their own
populations, international development experts said. The production of palm oil
is another big driver of large acquisitions. Seven of top 10 target countries
are located in Africa; the other three are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and
Argentina.
A large number of these acquisitions
are domestic, driven by local elites, Taylor and other experts said. But
tracking land deals at that level has proven difficult due to their relative
small size and the fact that they often happen under the radar.
“What we hear is that the pressure
locals feel from land grabbing is often higher from the accumulation of small
deals by locals than large ones from outsiders,” Taylor said.
Get involved in mapping communal lands
One of the newest efforts to help
indigenous populations retain control over their land involves the creation of
a global map designating community claims, Taylor said. The project was adopted
during a two-day land tenure conference in Interlaken that ended Sept. 20.
At the event, representatives from
development agencies, private investors, companies and governments described
efforts to map the globe’s communal lands as a concrete step toward helping
indigenous communities secure customary rights in the face of large land deals.
A few countries — notably Indonesia —
have already begun to draw communal boundaries. It’s a promising step toward
ensuring transparency in land deals, experts agree. But the initiative is still
very new.
“We don’t have a lot of data in yet,”
Taylor said. “We’ll see over the coming years, this data starting to emerge.”
Creating a global repository of
communal land claims is just one measure. There are many other steps that
international development organizations can do to increase transparency in land
deals, experts said.
Assist governments in adopting
policies that require land deals to be made public, in writing, and in local
languages
Part of the problem with transparency
lies in the prevalence of oral land deals, or contracts that are too short to
set forth clearly the rights and responsibilities of the investor — or worse,
are written in a language that indigenous populations don’t understand.
“What is the capacity of the
community, if they are negotiating directly with an investor, to effectively
negotiate on their own behalf?” asked Carole Excell, a senior associate with
the Access Initiative at the World Resources Institute.
“You have to have the knowledge to comprehend the information given to you and
to negotiate effectively.”
Efforts are underway to help
governments and elsewhere to create freedom of information acts, especially in
Africa, where only 10 of 53 countries currently have some type of FOIA on the
books.
“Freedom of information laws are
really new in Africa,” Excell said.
Even in places that have such laws,
information has often not been available, she said.
“We’ve been looking at whether people
were getting responses or being ignored,” Excell noted. “We found that most of
the agencies did not comply with the requirements to give out information.”
Work directly with governments to
implement the voluntary guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure
In 2012, the U.N. Committee on World
Food Security adopted voluntary guidelines for land tenure that have since been
encouraged by the G-20, the U.N. General Assembly, and other international
bodies.
The guidelines help make land deals
more transparent by urging governments to conduct impact assessments of
proposed investments in land to determine their impact on local people and land
rights, experts said.
Many governments, however, lack the
resources and ability to carry out such assessments.
“It’s easy to say, but not that easy
to do,” Vhugen, of Landesa, said. “Most governments don’t have the capacity to
do it, so helping them build this capacity is important.”
Work with private sector investors to
ensure that individual and communal land tenure is recognized
Many international companies seeking
to invest in the developing world try to make sure that local residents are not
displaced. Sometimes they are motivated by the knowledge that their customer
base is paying attention to whether cocoa or coffee, for instance, has been
cultivated sustainably using fair trade practices.
At other times, they are being compelled
by governmental partners. European aid leaders, for instance, have been putting
pressure on their U.S. counterparts to ensure that companies participating in
the New Alliance for Food Security & Nutrition are not resorting to “land
grabs” that negatively affects the environment and local communities,
especially women. The Food Alliance is meant to connect smallholder farmers in
Africa and elsewhere to domestic and international supply chains.
Oftentimes, transparency helps
companies manage risk — an issue that can affect their bottom line.
“Companies need to know if the
government is trying to lease them land claimed by three communities,” said
Peter Veit of WRI. “They need to know that this is a high-risk piece of land.”
Vhugen speaks periodically to private
sector investors about the need to recognize customary land tenure rights, and
most are not interested in displacing people, he said.
“Those people are going to try to find
a way to make you fail,” Vhugen said. “So it’s about risk management
considerations. Investors are quite responsive to this. So there is a lot the
international development community can do.”
Help governments enforce transparency
in land deals involving domestic investors
In many countries, the local elite are
buying up much of the land in chunks too small to track effectively, land
experts say. They generally aren’t susceptible to the kinds of risk management
assessments and reputational pressures that many international corporations
respond to.
In this case, development experts
recommend working with the local governments to ensure that small-scale land
deals also comply with laws promoting transparent land acquisitions and open
registration procedures.
“Realistically, that’s probably the
only way we can do it,” Vhugen said. “Nestle can find a way to ensure that a
domestic sugar company complies with certain requirements. But it only works if
that company relies on Nestle as a customer. Otherwise, you need the government
to create a level playing field.”
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