Nasarawa’s three years of land reform

Siraj Consultancy Engineering, the same firm that executed GIS in Abuja which has now come to be known as AGIS, was awarded the multi-million naira Nasarawa State GIS, simply called NAGIS to execute what has now come to beat the pioneer in various feats including Digital Aerial Mapping, a component which brought every single property, […]

Siraj Consultancy Engineering, the same firm that executed GIS in Abuja which has now come to be known as AGIS, was awarded the multi-million naira Nasarawa State GIS, simply called NAGIS to execute what has now come to beat the pioneer in various feats including Digital Aerial Mapping, a component which brought every single property, as well as the land cover of the entire state, measuring 27,300 square kilometres in images captured after the state was flown over between 2012 and 2013.
 The partners in the NAGIS project, comprising the state ministry of Land and Urban Development, Siraj Consultancy Engineering, Aeroprecisa Limited and GIS Transport have already delivered a GIS system.
The 2013 Global Geospatial Conference, Africa’s largest and regularly occurring GIS event attracted participation from NAGIS to showcase its GIS programme.
The Surveyor General of the Federation, Nigeria (SGOF), Professor Peter Nwilo and members of the Surveyors Council of Nigeria (SUCON) have long ranked Nasarawa top among the 36 states and the FCT in the implementation of lands reform to conform with world best practices.
The project has introduced a new certification. It now takes applicants 14 weeks only, to be presented with Certificates of Occupancy (CsofO), as against the previous practice where it took property owners and their progenies a lifetime to get the certificate.
Many applicants who acquired their properties as far back as the days of the old Plateau State were presented their certificates during the execution of NAGIS.
 Every bit of information on lands in the state is now in digital files and can be obtained with just a push on the computer button, a system which has eliminated loss or hiding of files by civil servants in the state.  
 State commissioner of Lands and Urban Development, Sonny Agassi, has long said the project changed the narrative about Nasarawa as an agrarian state turned sophisticated on account of this world-standard technology in lands management and administration.