Over 26,272 C-of-O issued in 3yrs — FCTA

The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has disclosed that nearly three times as many Certificates of Occupancy (Cs-of-O) have been issued to land allottees in the territory during the three years of President Bola Tinubu’s administration as were issued across the 13 years of previous administrations.

Senior Special Assistant to the FCT Minister on Public Communications and Social Media, Lere Olayinka, said in a statement on Sunday that 26,272 Certificates of Occupancy have been produced and signed by FCT Minister Nyesom Wike since President Tinubu took office, compared with a combined 8,697 issued between 2010 and 2023 under the administrations of Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari.

Jonathan’s five-and-a-half years in office accounted for 5,500 of that figure, while Buhari’s eight years produced 3,197.

Behind the numbers, Olayinka said, is a backlog problem that the current administration inherited rather than created, noting that many beneficiaries of the 26,272 certificates signed under Wike had held land allocations for over a decade without the paperwork to show for it.

He traced the bottleneck to inefficiencies in the old system that left landowners with little incentive to complete their payments, since there was no guarantee the document would follow promptly, or at all.

That, he explained, is what the FCTA has moved to resolve.

“The moment necessary payments are made, land allottees can now receive their C-of-O within two weeks,” Olayinka said, adding that an automated notification system now alerts allottees as soon as their documents are ready for collection, replacing a process that previously left applicants to track updates through informal means.

According to him, the stakes go beyond paperwork, as a Certificate of Occupancy serves as trusted collateral for banks and financial institutions. Its absence has long been identified as a major barrier to credit for small and medium-sized enterprises in the territory. Without it, property owners have effectively been locked out of loans, mortgages, and expansion capital.

The administration’s figures on related land transactions reflect a similar pattern. Over the three years under review, 2,521 Consents to Assign, the document required to sell property or transfer mortgage agreements were granted, alongside 177 Consents to Mortgage, the approval needed before a property can be pledged as loan collateral.

In comparison, 753 Consents to Assign and 180 Consents to Mortgage were granted under Jonathan, while 684 Consents to Assign and 164 Consents to Mortgage were issued under Buhari.