‘Estate owners are giving phony charges’

Some estate developers have nothing apart from briefcases. Some don’t have offices yet they often announce they’re building thousands of houses. We hardly see those houses.  Why is this happening in Abuja where there’re a lot of professionals and stakeholders?For mass housing, government didn’t consider the major stakeholders, estate surveyors and valuers. There’re criteria for […]

Some estate developers have nothing apart from briefcases. Some don’t have offices yet they often announce they’re building thousands of houses. We hardly see those houses.  Why is this happening in Abuja where there’re a lot of professionals and stakeholders?
For mass housing, government didn’t consider the major stakeholders, estate surveyors and valuers. There’re criteria for mass housing allocation to be given to any developer. Those who’re supposed to look into these criteria, estate surveyors are not in the forefront. We’re supposed to be at the conceptualisation of this idea so we advise them.
Most people, by chance they’re lucky to have one of their godfathers in the system, they get allocation, get to the place, they jettison what they had signed to do and sub-divide the plot.
After the sub-division, they call for infrastructural charges. They call all sorts of charges…before you move to site, you pay this, before you build you pay that. They take the law into their hands to the extent that they have their own development control system. They deprive the development control unit of FCT the opportunity to monitor what they do in the name of private developer.
They’ll say what they’re building is prototype design, they had got approval as mass housing and so all the houses be developed before they’re given the CofO. There’s massive abuse of the idea. The idea was to ensure that there’s production of houses for the public.
It was to ensure that the land is available for the public to build mass housing to reduce the cost of accommodation in Abuja. It wasn’t intended for these developers to move to site and sub-divide the plots. The idea was for the developer to move to site with his capability, with accessibility to loan facility and develop so that the cost of accommodation will come down and people will be accommodated. All this has been abused by these so called private developers.
Those not lucky to get allocation directly, force themselves into the system, buy at whatever rate, build-per adventure they build 10-20 houses, sub-divide the remaining plots then they start slamming all sorts of charges including ground rent which the law doesn’t permit them to collect. They turn themselves into super landlords which in land use decree is not permissible.
There’s abuse of the mass housing idea. Until government rethinks and revisits the idea, this abuse will continue.
Some of these mass housing projects were provided four or five years ago, up till now, infrastructure haven’t been fully provided. Go to Lokogoma and you see things. Plots were subdivided and sold to people. They paid excavation charges, development charges, all these charges stage by stage as the developer wanted to the extent that infrastructure charges were paid, yet no infrastructure.
We as estate surveyors and valuers, are looking at a situation whereby we’ll engage government to do what we call housing stock. By the time we do housing stock of all those mass housing, we’ll be able to give them what and what aren’t provided. We’ll enlist those facilities that were supposed to be provided but were not provided.
There’s case of a developer who collected money from the public to provide infrastructure in his estate but failed to do so. Now the residents are at war with him.
That’s true because the people have turned estates into extortion avenues. On one end, government officials aren’t helping matters. Probably, before he got approval, he might have spent more than necessary.
Everything is supposed to have been procured before moving to site-approvals ready, cost of infrastructure, bill of quantity, you’re ready to have outsourced infrastructure facilities to a contractor to build. All these things aren’t done.
Once they’re fortunate to get allocation, they move to site. Getting to site, once they’re able to build their site office and one or two prototype designs they start subdivision in order to recoup the money they paid to get the allocation. That’s why there’s abuse. Not until they recoup the money of site acquisition, they’ll not do anything.
What is your projected house cost in Abuja for a public worker?
 Going by the economic situation now, for a three-bedroom bungalow, average of between N5 million to N7 million. We look at cost of construction.
We propose affordable mortgage scheme for average Nigerian civil servant. Until affordable mortgage comes into existence, people will buy houses in bulk and encourage corruption because the quest to acquire property at all cost forces people into corruption.
It is said that facility management is another area fraud is being perpetrated by estate owners?
All this trickles down to lack of professionalism, people patronize quacks often. Some of these mass housing, on completion, their owners register their firms or get their relatives to undertake facility management. They don’t make recourse to professionals. We’re professional facility managers. If we’re properly consulted, our members can give them the best value for their money.
Most of the facility our members are managing, there’s no complaint. From time to time, they render account-three, four months. They say this is what we’ve spent on providing facilities for you for this period. And before money is paid the cost of facilities that will be procured is mentioned-like servicing of generator, refuse disposal, security guards, cleaning of common parks, servicing of electrical appliances externally and water. There’s need to engage professionals like us.