Problems and Prospect of Land Registration

Abstract or Introduction

This study focuses on the challenges and prospects of land registration in Akure South local government area of Ondo state, Nigeria. Many land owners have outdated documents regarding their land, or do not even have documents to show that they are truly the owner of the land that they claim to be theirs. This has caused a lot of problems in time past, where people fight and sometimes go as far as killing themselves over land disputes. Also, on the side of the government it has been difficult for them to keep a comprehensive record of land owners because most of them won’t come to register.

Land registration issues are more dominant among private estates because the registration of most government owned estates are done when allocating the land. A multi-stage sampling technique was used, and the stratified random sampling technique was used for the estates selected within Akure south, then the Simple random sampling technique was used to obtain the respondents within the respective estates. From the research carried out, the findings showed that many land owners are aware of the implication of not registering their land, and they wish to register their land but they feel the process of registration is too complicated, stressful and expensive, some don’t even know how to properly get their land registered and they end up getting duped by fraudsters, while a few of them fear that their land might be revoked if they go back to government for registration.

The Solutions proposed to thesechallenges is to first create awareness on how to properly get a land registered, and also make land owners know the importance and benefit of registering, creating a stronger data base that would replace the old pen and paper style which is long outdated, introducing the Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) which would help to capture and store data of land owners effectively, reduce the time frame used in carrying out the registration process to make it less stressful and discouraging, lastly to subsidize the registration fee for the first set of people who come to register after the awareness is made.