FCTA to allottees: violate titles, lose land

Our Reporter

THE Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) is set to revoke land titles over contracts’violations by allottees.

FCTA Director of Land Administration Alhaji Adamu Jibrin said the revocation would serve as a deterrent to others.

According to him, the revocation becomes inevitable following continued breach of contracts by allottees of plots within the territory, despite warnings.  He listed the breaches to include the non-payment of the yearly statutory ground rent, violation of land use as well as the failure to develop plots within the serviced areas after a reasonable period of time.

“One of the grounds for the revocation on titles is the non-payment of ground rent. Of recent, we have compiled the list of our debtors who have failed to pay. The ground rent is a statutory annual payment that must be complied with by all allottees. We have sensitised the debtors to come and pay their statutory fees, while some have started to respond, others have failed.

‘’In the Abuja master plan, each area is earmarked for a designated use, so if you are allocated a plot for commercial use for instance, you have no right to change the use by constructing residential or industrial building there. In most cases, there are places that we have provided infrastructure and it’s wrong to allow a plot to lay fallow when the area has been serviced. If government spends money to provide infrastructure, then we should utilise the facilities,” Jibrin said.

He observed that the FCTA Department of Dvelopment Control tried to accommodate the violators by charging them violation fee.

He stressed that now the options were either removal or reversion to the designated use. On land speculators, he noted that the FCTA does not give land to speculators, but rather to those who are ready to develop them.

On whether enough notices havve been given to the allottees, he said the FCTA had informed the people to go ahead and develop because it was part of the contracts the agency had with them.

“If the place is serviced for two to three years and you don’t develop, we’ll take it over because we have serious developers who have the capacity,” Jibrin said.

He called on Nigerians that are either indebted to the Administration or have flouted contracts to correct the breaches, noting that the sanction for flouting is a revocation of title.