On 29 March 1978, General Olusegun Obasanjo signed the Land Use Decree No. 6 of 1978. Five sections of it rewrote four hundred years of Nigerian land law.
Section 1. *Subject to the provisions of this Act, all land comprised in the territory of each State in the Federation is hereby vested in the Governor of that State, and such land shall be held in trust and administered for the use and common benefit of all Nigerians in accordance with the provisions of this Act.*
In one sentence, every square metre of Nigerian land outside the Federal Capital Territory was transferred from its owners — families, communities, corporations, freeholders, leaseholders — to the thirty-six state governors as trustees. Existing freehold titles were converted into statutory rights of occupancy for terms of up to 99 years. Existing customary titles were converted into customary rights of occupancy granted by Local Government Councils, subject to the governor's overriding consent for any transaction valued above ₦5,000 (now meaningless after currency collapse but never updated).
Section 22. No statutory right of occupancy could be mortgaged, sub-let, transferred, assigned or otherwise alienated without the prior consent of the Governor in writing. Every transfer of urban land in Nigeria — every sale, every mortgage, every long lease — now required a signature from the state government, for a fee.
Section 28. The Governor could revoke any right of occupancy in his absolute discretion for 'overriding public interest'. Compensation was limited to the value of unexhausted improvements on the land (buildings, crops) and *did not include the value of the land itself*. The state acquired the land at the cost of the bricks on it.
Section 47. The Act was entrenched in the 1979 Constitution at Section 274(5), giving it the status of a constitutional provision. It cannot be repealed or amended by ordinary legislation; amendment requires the constitutional-alteration procedure of Section 9 — two-thirds of the National Assembly plus two-thirds of the State Houses of Assembly. The Decree has been entrenched in every subsequent constitution: the 1989 (never operative), the 1995 (never operative) and the 1999 Constitution (Section 315(5)(d)).
Section 39 and 41. The decree distinguished urban land (designated by the governor) from non-urban land. Urban land was administered by the governor through a State Land Use and Allocation Committee; non-urban land was administered by the Local Government Council through a Land Allocation Advisory Committee. The distinction matters because the governor's consent is required for urban transactions but, in theory, not for non-urban. In practice, banks demand governor's consent on all transactions before they will accept land as security.
## Why the SMC went further than the Idigbe Panel
The public justification given by the Federal Military Government in March 1978 was threefold: (i) to give the federal and state governments the power to acquire land for development without paying speculative prices; (ii) to harmonise the four tenure regimes; (iii) to make land available to the landless. The first reason was the operative one. The federal land acquisitions for the Federal Capital Territory (decreed in 1976), the Lagos State Master Plan (1976), the new federal university campuses, the new state capitals and the army cantonments needed cheap, fast, indefeasible state title. The pre-1978 customary regime made cheap, fast acquisition impossible.
A second reason, less often stated, was that the SMC was preparing for the return to civilian rule in 1979 under a constitution in which oil-revenue allocation would be the dominant federal question. Vesting all land in state governors gave each governor a single, large, federally-recognisable asset class to administer — and gave the Federal Government a uniform compulsory-acquisition regime across the country for federal projects.
What the decree did *not* do was solve the credit problem the Idigbe Panel had been appointed to address. By replacing one form of impossible mortgage (family consent) with another (governor's consent), it ensured that Nigerian land remained, in practice, unmortgageable. That consequence is the subject of Act III.
## The constitutional question that was not asked
The Land Use Decree was promulgated by a military government under the Constitution (Suspension and Modification) Decree No. 1 of 1966, which gave the Federal Military Government plenary legislative power. No National Assembly debated it. No state legislature debated it. No community whose land was being vested was consulted. The Supreme Court has, in successive cases — *Abioye v. Yakubu* [1991] 5 NWLR 130, *Savannah Bank v. Ajilo* [1989] 1 NWLR 305, *Ezennah v. Atta* [2004] 7 NWLR 200 — confirmed that the decree as entrenched in the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions is good law. It has never asked whether a constitutional provision that retrospectively vested all land in the country in the political branch could lawfully be enacted by a military regime *propria motu*. The forty-five-year operation of the regime has, in the courts' view, settled the question by acquiescence.
Figure 1
Mortgage debt as a share of GDP, 2023: Nigeria vs comparators
Section 22 of the Land Use Act 1978 requires Governor's Consent for every mortgage. The result, four decades later: Nigerian mortgage debt is less than 1% of GDP — a hundredth of the developed-economy norm.
Figure 2
Median days to obtain Governor's Consent on a land assignment, 2023
The constitutional cost of s.22. Even Lagos — the best-resourced State Lands Registry — averages 180 days to consent a routine assignment; in most states the practical median exceeds six months.