Public Land Leasing as a value capture instrument for financing road infrastructure on Federal Government Land in Gwarinpa, Abuja - Nigeria

Public Land Leasing as a Value Capture Instrument for financing road infrastructure on Federal Government Land in Gwarinpa, Abuja-Nigeria. iii Summary The primary goal of this research was to study public land leasing as one of the instruments of Land Value Capture and applied it on how it could generate revenue to provide and maintain road infrastructure within the Federal Government Land in Gwarinpa, Abuja-Nigeria from 1999-2012. The main objective of the this study was to identify how the lease of public land could be used to capture land values and its increments to provide and maintain road infrastructure on federal government land using Gwarinpa as a case study. In order to answer the research question, four major dimensions were identified and examined so as to answer the sub-questions that will provide answer to the main question. These dimensions include; (i) legal, (ii) financial, (iii) economic and (iv) social. In this research, a qualitative approach was employed which considered the collection of primary and secondary data targeted at appropriate professionals and organisations. The primary data consisted of conducting fourteen different interviews with the government officials of Lands Department responsible for public leasing and the Engineering Department responsible for roads infrastructure. Moreover, secondary data used in this research includes the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended, the Land Use Act, records of revenue from public lease and expenditure on road infrastructure among others. This research has two critical variables; Public land leasing and road infrastructure. Under the public land leasing, premium and ground rent were considered as the revenue sources to provide and maintain road infrastructure. Premium which is a onetime payment from lease was compared with cost of road investment which is also a onetime project while ground rent which is an annual income from lease was compared with road maintenance which is also an annual expenditure on road in order to determine if the revenue from the lease of public land can provide and maintain road infrastructure on federal government land in Gwarinpa, Abuja. The main result of this study revealed that revenue generated through premium was very successful because it was able to cover more than the cost of road investment by 115% while revenue from ground rent was unable to cover the cost of road maintenance throughout the years. When considering the total revenue that was generated through ground rent from 1999-2012, it only covers 10.3% of the total cost of expenditure on road maintenance. However revenue generation through ground rent revealed some existence of administrative challenges such as the inability of the responsible institution to collect the full revenue because only few plot owners pays ground rent which led to an inefficient revenue generation. Therefore when considering the maximum amount of revenue that should be generated from the entire plots on annual basis, it was only in the year 2010 and 2011 that the revenue from ground rent would have been able to cover the maintenance cost of road. Furthermore, the total revenue that was supposed to be generated on ground rent from 1999-2012 would have only cover 51.4% of the total expenditure spent on road maintenance. In that instance, the lease of federal government land in Gwarinpa, was only able to provide roads through revenue from premium but was unable to maintain roads through the revenue from ground rent. Finally, from this research, recommendations were made in relation to the ways the entire revenue generation could be improved in order to assist the Federal Government in making this land instrument more efficient so that the revenue generation potentials could be increased in order to cover not only road infrastructure but set of other infrastructures.