ASSESSMENT OF LAND REGISTRATION SYSTEM IN KAFANCHAN JEMA'A LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA KADUNA STATE

In almost every part of the world, land accessibility and acquisition for major projects are excessively time consuming, costly and administratively cumbersome. For developing countries in the world (Nigeria inclusive), the inaccessibility of land is rapidly becoming one of the most serious impediment to social and economic development to a large extent, this problem is attributed to the lack of readily available and accurate data describing the property boundaries and ownership. In the normal sense, within our communities there must be and should always a difference between the methods of issuing the title to personal property and those to real estate property. Land registration systems, involve deeds recording, and title registration. A Deed recording is a system of giving publicity to land transactions and helping to prevent concealed dealings. The act of recording a deed gives notice to the public of a claimed interest in land and establishes priority against other possible claimants to the same interest although there is usually no statutory compulsion for parties to a transaction to record their documents although it is prudent for them to do so while it is risky if they do not. In most African countries, houses are in short supply and the land market appears to be moribund (Tibaijuka, 2004). In Nigeria, access to urban land is such a sensitive matter that the security of land rights can be precarious. This is reflected in the difficulty in searching for information for land transactions and the inefficient production of formal land title documents by the government (Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, 2006). Land title registration, with formal evidence of ownership such as a Certificate of Occupancy and formal documentation of land transactions in public land registries, are essential to the efficient functioning of the land markets. For instance, land titling stimulated land markets in Thailand where titling project increased the number of households engaged in land transaction and in Davao, Jakarta, Indonesia where tenure security such as having a registered title strongly affected land prices (Feder & Nishio, 1999). Title documents provide confidence to market operators and are important aspects of security of tenure. This can be seen in the example of China in which Ma et al. (2013) found that Chinese households that consider land certificates important to the protection of land rights make significant investments on agricultural land. Land registration is vital to the security of tenure and security of tenure plays an important role in enhancing investments in land. In particular, access to land with secure tenure is significant to urban housing delivery. This is important to Nigeria as it faces a severe urban housing shortage. The overall housing deficit is estimated at 17 million units as of 2014 (The Nigeria Housing Finance Programme, 2014). Land registration was introduced in Nigeria by the British Colonial Administration in 1863 (Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, 2006). However, despite this relatively long history of land registration and the importance of land registration to land market, the level of land title registration is low (Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, 2006). Estimates indicate that in all of Africa, less than 15% of the land has been officially registered with title deeds, and for the sub- Saharan Africa it is just 1% (Tibaijuka, 2004). However, the reasons behind why registration rarely occurs is where this research emerges.