The importance of Land Titles cannot be overemphasized because the government has confiscated a lot of properties and People who have taken it for granted have fallen victim by either lossing a lot of money or been trapped in unnecessary legal dispute.

Before you acquire or invest any property It is always best to investigate, so it is pertinent that you ask, know and verify what title comes with the property and even when you have verified what kind of title comes with your acquired property, you also need to know how that title impacts your property. Therefore you need to understand the primary and secondary system of land title documents under the government.

Historically, all lands belong to the indigenous families dwelling on such lands but the Land Use Act, enacted in 1978 vested all urban land within a state in the state governor to hold on behalf of the people, and as such the governor is therefore responsible for allocation of land in all urban areas to individuals resident in the state or to organizations for residential, agricultural, commercial, and other purposes.

Specifically, there are different types of land titles a land may have, and consequently different impacts on the said land. There are PRIMARY and SECONDARY land title documents. We will focus more on the primary land titles on this article because without it there is of no use going to get the secondary land tile documents such as certificate of occupancy(C of O), deed of assignment, governor consent, government excision, government gazette, etc.

Here are three primary system land title documents
1 Freehold
2 Acquired
3 Committed

 FREEHOLD
A free land is that which the government has not indicated any interest and has no future use of it.
Lands or estates possessing a Freehold title document have an indefinite duration and can last forever. These are lands and estates with full-time ownership without government intervention and do not have any plan to use the land for public infrastructural development e.g Roads, school or hospital etc in the future.
Lands under freehold can easily be inherited by the heirs of the original owners.The holder is entitled to all rights in the property. It is the highest type of interest in real estate recognized by law. The estate is of unlimited duration and when the owner dies, the estate passes on to the heirs of the owner. Freeholds are the type of titles you get in Epe, Lagos State Nigeria.
With Freehold, processing your Certificate of Occupancy is faster.

 ACQUIRED
A land is said to be acquired if the government has an interest in the area for the purpose of urban development or industrialization projects, and if such land that is acquired does not have a specific government purpose yet and it can be later be free or committed by the government as the case maybe. So much probing need to be done to know why it is acquired and whether it be free or committed.
You can get a land that government acquired to be free through: 1. Excision and 2. Ratification.


 COMMITTED
The land with committed means the government has designated that parcel for a specific project as such those parcels of land can never be released to individuals or organizations for development projects. Acquiring lands that are committed will eventually lead to the loss of such investments when government moves to take full possession of such a parcel of land.

Comment on this thread to share your with land title documents that can help others and if you want to understand more on it.