IRIN Focus on demands for repeal of land law

Campaigns by the communities of the oil-rich Niger Delta in southern Nigeria for control over its mineral resources have assumed a new urgency in recent years. As disaffected youths disrupt oil activities and state governors from the region wage a constitutional battle with the federal government on the sharing of oil revenue, another issue has become a major focus of discontent among the ethnic minorities that inhabit the region: Nigeria's land use act. Passed by President Olusegun Obasanjo by military decree in 1978 – during his time in office as a military ruler - the act vests ownership of all land in Nigeria in the state. When various ethnic minority activist groups met last week in Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa State, to articulate demands to be presented to the authorities, at the top of their list was a call for the immediate abrogation of the act. "The decree essentially is an undemocratic imposition, which has alienated communities and peoples from their right to land," Oronto Douglas, a lawyer at Environmental Rights Action, one of the activist groups represented at the Yenagoa conference, told IRIN. "The decree torpedoed the legal maxim that he who owns the land owns everything attached to it, both below the ground and above the ground. That is why our campaigns revolve around total abrogation of the land use decree and justifiable return of pristine rights to the people," he added. The law has always been steeped in controversy. Ahead of his Planned handover of power to civilians in 1979, Obasanjo had set up a constituent assembly which debated and formulated a draft constitution presented to the military government. That draft did not include the land use law but by the time the 1979 constitution was promulgated, Obasanjo had arbitrarily grafted the Land Use Decree - which he had issued a year earlier - onto it. Many critics, armed with hindsight, charge that the law was most probably made with oil multinationals in mind. The aim, they say, was to smoothen the multinationals' access to land and overcome difficulties that communities, which traditionally have a strong attachment to land, would have posed in the form of prolonged negotiations. "Nowhere has the full, adverse implications of this law manifested themselves in Nigeria as they have done in the oil-producing areas," Joe Okoye, a lawyer, told IRIN. The oil multinationals play a major role in Nigeria's economy. The joint ventures they operate in partnership with the government produce more than 95 percent of the country's crude oil output of over two million barrels per day. The act came as a boon to them. When they need land for their operations, they are required to apply to the government. Armed with government approval, they can take possession of the land without even consulting the communities concerned. And where there is a conflict of interest, the law gives precedence to the interest of the government. According to Douglas, the communities are now left with what is described in Nigerian oil industry parlance as "surface rights". This entitles landowners to compensation for crops, buildings or other improvements on the land, but not for the use of the land. "If a farmer left his land fallow when the land was requisitioned, as often happens in these parts, he will earn no compensation," Okoye said. Oil region communities claim that where compensation is paid there is no standard for assessment, and they find the sums paid for economic trees "ridiculously" low. For instance, compensation for a cassava plant is 20 naira (US $0.17), whereas farmers estimate the value of the yields of mature plants at 500-1,000 naira (US $4 - 8). Another sore point for most communities is the fact that the government earns the rent and royalties due to the landowner. Oil operations have a voracious appetite for land - whether to conduct seismic studies or set up oil rigs, build flow stations, lay pipelines or provide camp facilities in remote locations, or build offices and houses in cities. Official figures show that the concessions of Royal/Dutch Shell cover some 31,000 sq km of the Niger Delta's 70,000 sq km. Shell is the leading producer in Nigeria, accounting for a little under half of total output. It has most of its operations on land, unlike Chevron and Mobil whose concessions are mostly offshore. Shell is progressively working towards 100 percent seismic coverage of its concessions. Activists are unhappy that the land use decree provides the oil companies with easy, cheap access to land in the Niger Delta, a factor which, they believe, contributes to Nigeria's reputation as the country with the cheapest oil production costs in the world. Industry estimates put onshore production costs at less than US $2 per barrel in Nigeria compared to up to US $7 in some other places. "The military access which the land use decree guarantees the oil multinationals to land would not have been possible if the law had gone through the democratic process," Douglas said. "And that is what the oil companies are enjoying."