Wike signs 26,272 Cs of O in 3yrs – FCTA

By Omeiza Ajayi

The Federal Capital Territory Administration FCTA has disclosed that nearly three times as many Certificates of Occupancy have been issued to land allottees in the territory in the three years of the President Bola Tinubu 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 the 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 the current administration inherited rather than created: many beneficiaries of the 26,272 certificates signed under Wike had been sitting on 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 said, is what the FCTA has moved to fix. “The moment necessary payments are made, land allottees can now get 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 chase updates through informal means.

According to him, the stakes go beyond paperwork, noting that a Certificate of Occupancy is the document banks and financial institutions treat as trusted collateral, and its absence has long been flagged as a specific obstacle to credit for small and medium businesses in the territory. Without it, landowners sitting on real assets have effectively been locked out of loans, mortgages, and expansion capital they could otherwise access.

The administration’s figures on related land transactions follow the same pattern. In the three years under review, 2,521 Consents to Assign, the document required to sell property or transfer loan agreements, were granted, alongside 177 Consents to Mortgage, the approval needed before a property can be pledged as loan collateral. That compares with 753 Consents to Assign and 180 Consents to Mortgage under Jonathan, and 684 Consents to Assign and 164 Consents to Mortgage under Buhari, the statement showed.

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