Nigeria’s dead capital could unlock a trillion-dollar economy

When Nigeria looks for its trillion dollars, it tends to look to the big, headline sources: oil, foreign investment, a technology boom.

One of the largest pools of capital the country already has is in none of them. It is under people’s feet, in the homes they live in and the land they farm.

Most Nigerians own something.

Very few can prove it in a way a bank, a court or a buyer would fully accept.

The scale is striking. PwC estimates that Nigeria holds between 300 billion and 900 billion US dollars of what economists call dead capital: property people genuinely own and use, but cannot borrow against or pledge as security, because it carries no clear, registered title.

Such property still changes hands, but only informally, at a discount and at some risk, rarely with the legal certainty that lets a bank lend against it.

Fewer than one home in twenty has title a lender would readily accept. Set that against a measured economy of about 291 billion dollars, and the value locked out of the formal financial system rivals everything the country produces in a year.

One caution matters. Dead capital is a stock of assets, not a year of output, and the figure is the value of the assets, not the credit they would generate. Only a fraction of any property’s value is ever lent against, so the sums that would actually reach the economy are smaller, though still large.

What unlocking does is quieter, and in the end larger: it turns wealth that just sits there into capital that can work. A house you cannot borrow against is a shelter; the same house with a clear title is also a source of credit, for a business, a farm or a better home. The poor, the economist Hernando de Soto argued, are rarely without assets. They are without the paper that turns an asset into capital.

So why does the paper not exist? Not, for the most part, because people do not want it. The reasons are ordinary, and fixable. Registering a title in Nigeria is slow and costly. Under the Land Use Act of 1978, almost every transfer needs the state governor’s consent, and the registry will not act until the consent fee, stamp duty, registration charges and any capital gains tax on the sale are settled.

In Lagos those government charges come to roughly three percent of a property’s assessed value; once survey and legal fees are added, the total cost of buying and perfecting a title is commonly put at ten to fifteen percent of the price, and the process is ranked among the most cumbersome in Africa.

On top of that, much of Nigeria’s land, especially rural land, is held under customary and family arrangements that never enter a register at all. The wealth is real. The paperwork that would make it usable is too expensive and too slow to obtain.

This is also why the popular hope, that a digital register, perhaps built on a blockchain, will unlock it all, is only part of the answer. Technology genuinely helps, and Nigeria has a good example of its own.

Lagos began computerising its land records years ago, under a system introduced when the current President was the state’s governor, and now issues a secure electronic certificate of occupancy, with features meant to curb forgery, and lets people search and apply for titles online rather than only in a paper file.

That is real progress. But a faster way to record a title does little if obtaining it in the first place stays slow and costly, and still hinges on a government consent that must be sought and paid for. The binding constraint is not the ledger. It is the price and the process.

And the direction of travel on price is not encouraging. In May 2026 Lagos, the state that has done the most to digitise, sharply raised the official valuations on which perfection fees are charged, reportedly by as much as 300 to 525 percent in many areas. Its reasoning is sound: the official valuations had lagged far behind soaring market prices.

But the effect is that formalising a property just became far more expensive, and analysts warn the likely result is more informal development, not less. It captures the whole problem in a single decision: when formalising gets more expensive, people formalise less.

This is the same lesson the series keeps meeting. You cannot tax the informal economy into the light, and you cannot register a nation’s land by decree either. People come in when the system is worth coming into: when a title is cheap, quick and secure enough that the credit and protection it brings outweigh the cost of getting it. For most Nigerians today, that balance does not add up.

The playbook is not to order all 774 local governments to register everyone. It is to make a title cheap and quick enough to be worth having: simplify the consent regime, cut the fees and the months, and build on the digital foundations Lagos and others have laid.

It means bringing customary and family land in, carefully, because customary tenure is not merely bad paperwork; it does real social work, and clumsy formalising can hand land to the well connected or strip it from the families, and the women, who depend on it. The test is not just formalisation, but formalisation for whom.

And it means lenders ready to turn a clean title into a loan, remembering that title is an enabler, not a guarantee: a bank still needs a creditworthy borrower, a sound valuation and a way to enforce the loan if it sours. This is not idle hope.

In late 2025 the federal government set up land reform task teams, and there is a push for a national land commission. Reform is slow, because the Act is shielded by the Constitution and can be changed only through the demanding process of a constitutional amendment, but it is moving.

None of this conjures a trillion dollars from nothing. But turn even a part of that sleeping wealth into collateral, and you begin to finance the homes, farms and small businesses that grow the economy year after year. It would be one of the cheapest sources of new investable capital the country could tap, because the assets already exist. They need recognising, not creating.

For anyone deploying capital, dead capital is not a lament, it is a pipeline. The moment a plot or a home gains a clear, enforceable title it becomes collateral, and markets that barely exist here become possible: mortgages, secured lending to small businesses, land put up as equity, title insurance against hidden claims.

The investors who do best will be the ones building the rails for formalisation, the registries, the title insurance, the credit products, the technology that makes a title bankable, rather than waiting for the state to finish the job. The prize is not a slice of today’s thin formal economy, but of the much larger one that clear title would bring into being.

We keep looking for the trillion dollars somewhere else. A good deal of it is sitting quietly in a plot outside Enugu, a shop in Kano, a family house in Ibadan: owned, lived in, and legally invisible. An asset you cannot prove you own is not yet a working asset. It is a hope. The task is not to conjure new wealth, but to recognise the wealth already here, and to make claiming it cheap and safe enough that people finally do.

This is part of a series exploring whether, and how, Nigeria can become a one trillion dollar economy, and the numbers behind the claim.

Frank Nnamka is a private equity and impact investor. He writes here in a personal capacity, and the views expressed are his own and do not reflect the position of his employer or any organisation he is affiliated with.