Fashola Inaugurates Issuance of Electronic C of O Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), Friday performed a symbolic flag-off of the issuance of the new Electronic Certificate of Occupancy to replace the old Yellow C of O. He said however, that the old document remains valid until Government was ready to make the total changeover. In his remarks at the brief ceremony at the Lands Bureau to hand over the new document to some beneficiaries who were randomly selected, Fashola expressed joy that the milestone has been achieved through a lot of hard work and sacrifice. According to him, Government was doing everything possible to certify land titles to ensure safety of the investments that people put their life savings to acquire. The Governor told Lagosians, “I am happy that we are here but there is a lot of work still ahead to be done. For those who already hold this document (the yellow C of O), you have no cause to worry. We believe that a substantial number of this document comes from us; but we don’t eliminate the possibility that there may have been some undesirable conduct along the line”. “So we will invite you in a more organised process to turn in the yellow documents in order to have the e-certificate. It is not something we advise that you go into a stampede about. We are going to be orderly about it but we expect that you will take the opportunity so that we can gradually clean up”, he said. According to him, “We are a State and a Government of methods and I think that if we apply methods and processes we can do this handover and changeover seamlessly without inflicting any inconveniences and any pains on ourselves”. Assuring residents that Government would continue to produce more of the electronic document, Governor Fashola added, “We have flagged off this exercise and I know that in the weeks past some people have collected.” Pointing out that the ceremony was a symbolic one to communicate with the public the milestone already reached. “This is just a symbolic exercise that enables me to communicate with members of the public that this is the milestone that we have reached on the journey that we committed to undertake to certify land titles to ensure safety of the investments that people put their life savings to acquire and to ensure that in the process of buying a land they no longer end up buying a lawsuit”, the Governor said. Reviewing the journey to the production of the e-C of O, the Governor recalled that it started when the administration of Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu first digitalised the entire land registry taking away files from public view and scanning millions of documents in the Lands Bureau. “We have moved from geographic mapping of our State to being able to keep all our land records now in an electronic form. We know where land is and we know what sizes they are and I think that it is gradually making the work of all the land administrators a lot easier in the sense that it is not all the time now that they have to go into the bush to get dimensions of land”, he said. On the security of the new document and its advantage over the old one, the Governor explained, “This document that we now have is a more secure document with security printed papers. There are all sorts of features that if you tamper with them you will actually destroy them. They are capable of self-destruction and only a few people have access to this paper, I don’t have access to it and I don’t need to see it in order to sign”. “There is also a lot of information on this paper that the naked eye cannot see; so the backward reader is able to see all of the transactions and steps and then for registry of titles to be much more able to verify and advise people who want to buy land, who want to take mortgages, who want to lease out land and people who want to check whether there is any transaction on their land to do so. According to him, “So, many of us are now operating on a digital platform until all the processes are completed. It gets to me electronically, I verify and I sign. So this way there is a lot of checks and balance to eliminate the possibility of people having an unauthentic document”. thisdaylive
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 12:22:40 +0000
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