Landowners across Anambra State have been handed a firm ultimatum: recertify your old Certificates of Occupancy (C of Os) by December 31, 2026, or face being locked out of essential land transactions once the state’s legacy land records system goes dark.
The warning came in a public notice issued by the Anambra State Ministry of Lands on September 1, 2026, and signed by the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Mrs. Nkeiru Mokwe.
According to the notice, the state’s old land administration platform will be shut down indefinitely once the deadline passes, and titleholders who have not updated their documents by then will be unable to process a range of transactions through the ministry.
The affected transactions are not minor paperwork matters; they sit at the heart of how Anambra residents borrow against, transfer, and formally document their property. They include:
- Mortgages
- Deeds of Assignment
- Certified True Copies (CTCs)
- Registration of Powers of Attorney, including irrevocable ones
Put simply, an old C of O that hasn’t been recertified and captured in the state’s digital records won’t be usable to secure a loan, sell property, or complete other formal land dealings once the cutover happens.
At the center of the exercise is the Anambra State Geographic Information System, or ANAMGIS, the state’s current digital land administration platform.
The ministry says the recertification drive is designed to migrate existing paper-based land records into this modern database, replacing a legacy system that has run in parallel until now.
Only titleholders whose records have been verified, updated, and integrated into ANAMGIS will be permitted to carry out transactions once the old system is retired. The ministry has described the recertification exercise as already underway and is urging landowners who haven’t yet applied to do so “without delay.”
Importantly, the notice stops short of declaring that an unrecertified C of O becomes void once the deadline passes. What it does say is that such documents can’t be used for the listed transactions through the Ministry of Lands under the old framework, a distinction that matters for landowners weighing how urgently to act but one that still leaves plenty of practical incentive to get ahead of the cutoff.
The Anambra initiative doesn’t exist in isolation. It fits into a much larger, nationwide campaign to formalize land ownership across Nigeria, an effort driven by the staggering scale of property wealth currently locked out of the formal economy.
A PwC report estimates that Nigeria holds somewhere between $300 billion and $900 billion in what economists call “dead capital”: land and property that people own and use but cannot leverage as collateral or trade formally because it lacks clear, registered title. It’s wealth that exists on the ground but not on the books and, by extension, not in the banking system.
The Federal Government has made closing that gap a policy priority. As Nairametrics reported in 2024, Abuja has partnered with the World Bank on a National Land Documentation and Titling Programme aimed at lifting the national land formalization rate from under 10% to 50% over the next decade.
The plan leans heavily on state governments to do the on-the-ground work of registering, documenting, and titling land, which is effectively what Anambra is now doing with its ANAMGIS rollout.
Officials argue that better documentation doesn’t just tidy up paperwork; it unlocks economic value, turning static assets into property that can be mortgaged, sold with confidence, or used to raise capital for businesses and households alike.
For Anambra landowners, the message from the state Ministry of Lands is straightforward: the clock is running. Those holding old C of Os have until the end of December to get their documents recertified and captured in ANAMGIS.
Miss that window, and while the underlying title may not be automatically invalidated, the practical ability to mortgage, assign, or otherwise formally deal in that property through the state’s land bureaucracy will be cut off at least until the paperwork catches up.
With Nigeria’s dead-capital problem running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, Anambra’s recertification drive is a small but telling piece of a much bigger effort to bring the country’s land records and the wealth tied up in them into the formal economy.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Anambra landowners with old Certificates of Occupancy have until December 31, 2026, to recertify their documents in the ANAMGIS database. After that, the old system shuts down, and they’ll be unable to mortgage, assign, or otherwise formally transact on that property through the Ministry of Lands.
The title itself isn’t automatically voided, but without recertification, it becomes practically useless for the transactions that matter most. Anyone holding an old C of O should start the process now rather than risk being locked out when the deadline hits.
