In most functional societies, those quaint places where governments occasionally remember they exist to serve rather than to frustrate, when a citizen submits an application requiring official action, a few basic courtesies are observed. An acknowledgment. A request for missing documents if needed. Perhaps even a timeline, however optimistic. The machinery of state, however rusty, at least coughs to confirm it has received your papers.
Not in Edo State. Here, an application for a Certificate of Occupancy is treated with the same solemn attention one might afford a leaf falling in the forest. You submit. You wait. Crickets. No receipt. No query. No “we are looking into it.” Just the deafening administrative silence that has become the state’s preferred form of customer service.
Then, when the economic and political backlash becomes too loud to ignore, the explanations finally emerge, delivered with the air of a man who has just discovered the problem he helped create. According to the Edo State Geographical Information System (EDOGIS), the agency inherited a backlog of over 3,500 applications from the previous administration. The usual suspects are wheeled out: fake survey plans produced by people who wouldn’t know a theodolite from a toothbrush; incomplete documentation; overlapping claims on the same plot; and, of course, those pesky middlemen in the diaspora who promise miracles while submitting documents that would not survive a mild breeze.
Progress, we are told, has been made. Over a thousand C of Os have been signed and prepared for collection. Citizens are also warned that demolition of illegal structures on government land is imminent, so please verify your status before you start building. All very responsible. All very late.
What is missing from this carefully curated narrative is any evidence that the applicants themselves were ever informed of these shortcomings in real time. No letters. No emails. No polite bureaucratic notes explaining that their survey plan was drawn by a man whose only qualification was enthusiasm. Just silence, followed by a press release when the pressure mounts.
The deeper problem, of course, is not merely inherited backlog. It is the peculiar governing style that treats institutions created by a predecessor as haram. Leadership was dismissed. Replacements arrived late. Documents requiring the governor’s signature sat in limbo while the signature itself remained inconsistent, an administrative detail that somehow proved more difficult to resolve than the land disputes of an entire state. At one point, during a visit to London, the governor claimed an eighteen-year-old had somehow managed to register acres of land, prompting him to personally “investigate” by working the phones and, in the process, freezing the activities of the very registry meant to process applications. One can almost picture the scene: a chief executive governing by vibes, improvisation, and selective outrage rather than the dull, necessary grind of constitutional process.
Having failed to run a competent system, the old Nigerian chestnut is now produced: fraud. Fraud, we are reminded, is a national pastime. True enough. But the proper response to a national pastime of that sort is to build systems that make it harder, not to use the existence of fraud as a blanket excuse for paralysis. Alleging mischief is easy. Designing procedures that detect and deter it while still allowing legitimate applications to move is harder, and apparently less appealing.
The result is predictable. Capital is locked up in unregistered land. Diaspora investors grow wary. Ordinary citizens who followed the rules are left holding paper that means nothing until the government decides the political weather has improved. And when the inevitable questions arise, the answer is always the same: it was the last people, the fake surveyors, the agents, the fraudsters. Everyone, it seems, except the people currently holding the pen.
In Edo State, the land may belong to the people, but the silence belongs to the government. And silence, as any frustrated applicant can confirm, is the most expensive commodity of all.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 