This article sheds light on the meaning of land tenure systems in Nigeria and their significance to the nation’s agricultural economy. Characteristics of traditional Nigerian land tenure systems, tenure innovations, and land reforms are discussed.
Defining Land Tenure in Agricultural Contexts
The term “Land” is often used geographically to encompass natural resources from the atmosphere to several meters beneath the soil surface, including soil to root depth, vegetation, fauna, water, and surface minerals.
In Nigeria, “Land” also holds spiritual and socio-political meanings. Famoriyo notes that rural dwellers view land as embodying a deity acting as earth’s guardian, requiring appeasement to avoid wrath. Socio-politically, land symbolizes a nation, town, or community.
Land tenure refers to rights to hold, use, and possess natural resources within the land profile. Peter Dorner suggests these rights may involve legal, contractual, or customary arrangements.
The land tenure system comprises rules and procedures governing rights, duties, liberties, and exposures of groups and individuals in using and controlling land and water resources.
It includes three components: ownership, transfer, and use. Adegboye defines “Ownership” as the right to retain land for specific uses, enabling occupation, use, leasing, and redemption.
“Use” denotes the purpose for which land is employed, while “Transfer” involves conveying land rights temporarily or permanently from one person or group to another.
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Importance of Land Tenure in Nigerian Agriculture
Land is a critical resource, particularly in Nigeria, where agriculture drives the economy and sustains livelihoods, especially in rural areas.
Land possession and control are deeply interwoven with social life, particularly among rural dwellers. The importance of land tenure includes:
i. Providing space for settlement and shelter construction.
ii. Serving as the source of basic subsistence needs, making land a major production factor.
iii. Being the site for burial of the dead.
iv. Forming the basis for identity and association with relatives, lineage, or clan, rooted in decades of clan connection to the soil.
v. Measuring wealth and prestige locally by land area owned.
vi. Driving economic development through farming, raw material provision, industrial siting, mineral extraction, and infrastructure development.
vii. Influencing land use planning, landscaping, and wildlife conservation, with direct linkages to tenure systems.
viii. Acting as a political tool for manipulating resource allocation through land reform policies.
Characteristics of Traditional Nigerian Land Tenure in Agriculture
The traditional Nigerian land tenure system exhibits distinct features:
- Land is considered community property (family, village, or clan), with individual rights co-existing alongside community rights, typically granted by birth or adoption, emphasizing use rather than final disposal.
- Disposal rights are held by groups, not individuals, organized hierarchically from elementary families to tribes. An individual holds land as a group member, except among the Fulani, where families are not customary land-owning units.
- Land symbolizes territorial integrity, leading to reluctance to sell, especially to strangers, requiring family consent for hereditary land sales.
- Basic concepts like ownership, sale, and purchase lack clear definitions, creating ambiguity about whether “ownership” refers to group membership or personal property.
- Transactions are unwritten, relying on mutual trust and witness attestation due to the absence of surveys, registrations, or legal documents in rural areas, though customary law, largely unwritten, is nationally recognized.
- Until the 1978 Land Use Decree, a dual legal system operated: English law governed commercial land transactions in urban areas, while customary law applied in rural areas.
Advantages of Traditional Land Tenure in Agricultural Systems
- Ensures each community member’s right to use land, securing survival.
- Prevents broad-scale land speculation by emphasizing community ownership and use rights.
- Provides a foundation for potential land nationalization and cooperative or collective farming.
Disadvantages of Traditional Land Tenure in Agriculture
- Prevents using land as loan collateral, hindering agricultural credit programs and input markets.
- Perpetuates land fragmentation through inheritance, dividing land among sons in diminishing sizes, maintaining subsistence production.
- Discourages tenant cultivators from investing in land improvements due to insecure rights against other community members’ claims.
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Innovations in Land Tenure for Nigerian Agriculture
Tenure innovations refer to land reform measures, involving national government decisions to modify institutional and structural relationships in land use and control.
Land reform intervenes in ownership, control, and usage patterns to restructure holdings, enhance productivity, and broaden benefit distribution.
It responds to political pressures for socio-economic changes driven by population growth, limited land bases, or egalitarian ideologies. Arguments for land reform in Nigeria include:
- A 2.5% population growth rate and rising food, fiber, and export crop demands necessitate rational land policies.
- Declining traditional authority and customary rules’ inadequacy in monetized agriculture require reform.
- Increasing inter-group litigation and disputes in urban and rural areas demand formalized policies.
- Rational land policies strengthen state roles in agricultural development planning.
- Reorganizing agrarian structures counters negative capitalist production effects.
- Ending farm fragmentation from traditional inheritance and shifting cultivation enhances commercial agriculture.
Arguments against land reform include: - Abundant land resources suggest no immediate constraints.
- Export crop production has increased through acreage expansion, indicating agro-technical improvements and incentives are needed, not reform.
- Unlike Latin America, Nigeria lacks distinct land-owning and non-owning classes.
- Radical policy shifts may create large landlords and landless classes.
- Nationwide land reform is costly, requiring surveys, registries, farm settlements, and personnel Nigeria may lack.
Outcomes of Land Reforms in Nigerian Agricultural Systems
Despite debates, Nigeria has undertaken mini and major land reform measures. Mini reforms, such as farm settlements, group farms, and government plantations on acquired land, did not alter traditional tenure but experimented with large-scale farming.
The first comprehensive reform began with the 1978 Land Use Decree No. 6, vesting all state land under the Governor, held in trust for Nigerians’ benefit.
Urban land is managed by the Governor with the Land Use and Allocation Committee, while rural land is controlled by Local Governments.
The general outcome is that all land users, whether group members or tenants, are reduced to leaseholders, becoming government tenants.
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