Every Nigerian administration since the return to civilian rule in 1999 has either commissioned a review of the Land Use Act or carried a manifesto commitment to amend it. None has succeeded. The reason is structural: the Act is entrenched in Section 315(5)(d) of the 1999 Constitution and can only be altered by the constitutional-amendment procedure of Section 9 — two-thirds of each chamber of the National Assembly and the approval of two-thirds of the 36 State Houses of Assembly. That super-majority is, in practice, controlled by the same state governors who are the principal beneficiaries of the current regime.
## The reform attempts
Obasanjo, 2004. A Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform was constituted under the chairmanship of Professor Akin Mabogunje. The committee's 2006 final report recommended (i) the removal of the Act from the Constitution; (ii) the abolition of the governor's consent requirement on mortgages; (iii) the systematic registration of customary holdings; (iv) the establishment of a National Land Reform Commission. Of the four recommendations, only the establishment of the Commission was acted on, under President Yar'Adua in 2009. The Commission was inaugurated, sat for three years, and produced an interim report. The constitutional-amendment bill it recommended was introduced in the National Assembly in 2012 and defeated at the State Houses of Assembly stage — only 11 of the 36 State Assemblies passed the bill against the required 24.
Jonathan, 2012. The Federal Government included land-reform legislation in its Transformation Agenda. A second amendment bill was introduced in the Sixth National Assembly's Constitution Review Committee. It was withdrawn before second reading after the Conference of Governors of Nigeria objected through the Nigeria Governors' Forum.
Buhari, 2017. The Sixth Alteration Bill consolidated by the National Assembly contained a proposed amendment that would have removed the Land Use Act from the Constitution and converted it into ordinary legislation. The proposed amendment was passed by both chambers of the National Assembly but again failed at the State Houses of Assembly stage, securing only 17 of the required 24. The same Nigeria Governors' Forum lobbying drove the defeat.
Tinubu, 2024. A revised Presidential Committee on the Reform of the Land Tenure System was inaugurated in March 2024 under the chairmanship of Adeniyi Akintola SAN. As of the date of this entry, the committee has not reported.
## Why every reform has failed
The explanation given by reform advocates — Mabogunje, Akintola, the World Bank's Land Governance Assessment teams of 2013 and 2019 — is that the veto sits with the State Houses of Assembly, and the State Houses of Assembly are, in practice, controlled by the state governors whose patronage and revenue base the existing Act sustains. A governor whose office grants and revokes urban land titles, whose office charges consent fees and capital-gains taxes on every urban land transaction, whose office can issue and re-issue Certificates of Occupancy across electoral cycles, has no institutional reason to support an amendment that would transfer those powers to a national tenure register, an independent commission, or to the landholders themselves.
A second factor is that the Act's most damaging effects — the killing of mortgage credit, the displacement of customary holders, the use of compulsory acquisition for non-public purposes — fall on populations who do not vote at the State House of Assembly stage of constitutional amendments. The professional reformer constituency (banks, mortgage institutions, urban planners, the World Bank) has no electoral leverage at all on a State House of Assembly. The patronage constituency (party officials, contractors, allocatees of state-issued plots) does.
A third factor is the legitimate distributive concern raised by Northern political and traditional institutions: that an open-market land regime would, in practice, transfer Northern land to Southern and foreign buyers within a generation, replicating in land what the colonial economy did in commerce. The 2017 amendment debate at the Kano State House of Assembly turned explicitly on this point. The point is not unreasonable; it is also a separate question from the credit, mortgage and customary-displacement questions, and is treated by reform advocates as a question to be answered by transitional safeguards in any amendment, not as a reason to retain Section 22.
## What an honest reform would do
The technical content of an honest Land Use Act reform is now well-rehearsed across four successive panel reports and is broadly uncontested by the professional community. It would:
- Remove the Act from the Constitution (returning it to ordinary legislation amendable by simple majority).
- Abolish the requirement of governor's consent on mortgages secured over residential and commercial property, replacing it with a simple registration requirement at the Lands Registry.
- Cap the cumulative transaction tax on property registration at a single-digit percentage of the property's value (the 2023 World Bank figure for Lagos is 11.1 per cent).
- Systematically register customary holdings under a national Land Tenure Register, building on the Liberia Land Authority model and the Rwanda Land Tenure Regularisation Programme.
- Reform Section 28 to require fair-market compensation including the unimproved value of the land, on the analogy of the Indian Right to Fair Compensation Act 2013.
- Establish an independent National Land Commission with regulatory authority over state lands bureaux, on the analogy of the Kenyan National Land Commission established under the 2010 Kenyan Constitution.
None of these reforms is novel. None has been adopted in Nigeria. The 1978 Decree, drafted in a federal cabinet meeting that took less than a week, has outlasted every constitutional review, every presidential committee, every World Bank diagnostic and every major-party manifesto of the last quarter-century. It is the most resilient single piece of military-era legislation in the federation, and it is so because it works — exactly as it was designed to work — for the people who have the constitutional veto over its amendment.