The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, has ordered the cancellation of 485 land titles in Abuja after an extensive verification exercise found that the documents failed official authenticity checks.

The decision followed a joint review by the Department of Land Administration and the Abuja Geographic Information Systems, AGIS, which scrutinised applications submitted for the regularisation of Area Council land allocations. Officials said many of the affected documents were either forged or did not meet the legal and procedural standards required for recognition by the Federal Capital Territory Administration, FCTA.

In a public notice marked Batch I, the FCTA announced that the invalid applications had been expunged from its regularisation database. The notice specifically targeted applicants who had presented Area Council land papers for validation, warning that any document confirmed to be fake or irregular would not be recognised for title processing.

The cancellations cut across several Area Councils and layouts. In Bwari Area Council, the affected locations include Ushafa Village Expansion Scheme, Ushafa Extension and Dawaki Extension 1. Within the Abuja Municipal Area Council, the exercise touched Kurudu-Jikwoyi Relocation, Kurudu Commercial, Karu Village Extension, Nyanya Phase IV Extension, Jikwoyi Residential, Sabon Lugbe and Lugbe I Extension. Kuchiyako One layout in Kuje Area Council was also listed among the affected sites.

Notably, some institutional and corporate applicants were caught in the sweep, including the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the Ministry of Justice Staff Multi-purpose Cooperative Society, underscoring the breadth of the irregularities uncovered.

Under Nigerian law, all land in the Federal Capital Territory is vested in the Federal Government, with the FCT Minister empowered to grant statutory rights of occupancy. Certificates of Occupancy and related titles must be processed through the minister’s office and formalised by AGIS to be valid.

The mass cancellation is part of a wider reform of land administration in the FCT, aimed at tackling forged documents, double allocations and questionable grants allegedly issued by some Area Councils over the years. Data released by the FCTA shows the scale of the challenge: of 261,914 Area Council land documents submitted for regularisation between 2006 and 2023, only 8,287 had been fully screened, representing just 3.2 per cent of the total. The remaining 253,627 applications, or 96.8 per cent, are still awaiting clearance.