Property Tax Reform and Urban Housing Production and Consumption in Nigeria

In the past decade, the Nigerian government has witnessed dwindling revenues owing to fluctuating oil prices. This has necessitated the search for alternative revenue sources. For the authorities in Jos, the administrative city of Plateau State in north-central Nigeria, taxes within housing production and consumption loop were thought to be the easiest catch. Accordingly, the authorities intensified the generation of land titling fee, capital gains tax, value added tax, land use charge, ground rent, development permits, probate fee, withholding tax among others. These efforts came with some implication for urban housing. The paper aims to provide an understanding of this and it employed a wide range of secondary data of quantitative and qualitative forms in pursuits of two objectives. The first objective examined how property taxes were administered and found that multiple agencies were involved in tax administration and, as a result, double taxation occurred in land titling, seeking of development permits and probate. Furthermore, sporadic land and property registration impeded the development of a cadastre, thereby allowing the government to arbitrarily and outrageously apply taxes, which tax payers tried to evade through informal house building and property transactions. The second objective analysed the impact of property taxation and found that taxes accounted for a high cost of new housing and residential rentals but also had the potentials of stimulating housing production and consumption. Recommendations that could help the government generate revenue from taxing properties while also incentivising housing production and consumption were offered.