This article was submitted for the UN Economic Commission for Africa “2017 Conference on Land Policy in Africa” Nov. 14-17 2017, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
This article sheds light on a series of events that triggered escalating tensions over land and resources in the coastal communities of Lagos, Nigeria. This article provides an in-depth analysis of Nigeria’s laws on expropriation and the processes of acquiring land and compensating landholders in the Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) case. Specifically, the analysis addresses the following research questions:
The challenges associated with determining fair compensation for expropriated land have been extensively discussed and debated among scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and the public. However, to date, a comprehensive study of national-level compensation procedures established by law considering whether such procedures meet internationally recognized standards on compensation valuation has not been conducted.
Up to 2.5 billion people hold and use the world’s community lands, yet the tenure rights of women—who comprise more than half the population of the world’s Indigenous Peoples and local communities—are seldom acknowledged or protected by national laws.
Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) are an international instrument that can be used by many different actors to improve the governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests. The VGGT serve as a reference and set out principles and internationally accepted standards for the practices of responsible governance of tenure.