‘Nigerians least housed in the world’
People keep talking about housing crisis in Abuja. Is it that there’re really no houses or there are but out of reach of the average person?Both are problems. Adequate housing is not there at all for the ever increasing number of residents of Abuja. Two, the houses that are there aren’t affordable. Abuja is made […]
People keep talking about housing crisis in Abuja. Is it that there’re really no houses or there are but out of reach of the average person?
Both are problems. Adequate housing is not there at all for the ever increasing number of residents of Abuja. Two, the houses that are there aren’t affordable. Abuja is made to look like it’s meant for a particular class of Nigerians. Occasionally, I hear people say, well they don’t have to live in Abuja – they can come from Keffi, anywhere into Abuja.
That’s why you have the nuisance you have on the roads leading in and out of Abuja in the morning and evening. From 4 o’ clock, if you live around Nyanya or beyond, you better stay in the office till around 10:00pm when the children have gone to bed before you leave to be able to get in one piece or you risk being knocked down or having your car scratched in a terrible traffic jam – even if the road is expanded eighth times.
We don’t have adequate housing in Abuja. What we call housing for some category of people in Abuja is not housing – they should be for pigs. Go to places like Dei-Dei to see what people live in. A family of six, seven, eight live in a room the size of a dog house – no ventilation. We don’t call that housing. Not up to 20 percent of residents of Abuja are adequately housed. There’s massive shortage of housing.
Successive governments have paid lip service to the need for housing. A situation where a wife, husband and four children living in one can never be regarded as being housed. Or you have five, six families sharing one convenience, that’s no housing.
Then where houses are coming up, go and look at these so called estates, land is given out to people – few privileged ones get the land, build what they call estates saying they’re into property development. They’re building luxury bungalows, duplexes and they tell you it’s N28 million, N40 million. A typical Nigerian family, can it raise N40 million in 25 years?
What do you think government should do now?
There must be a deliberate policy of re-engineering the housing sector. Even the land use – I’m happy there’s a talk about review of the land use act. There must be sections of this Abuja that have to be made specifically for some category of housing, for some category of human beings so that everybody has a feel of the land. Housing is a fundamental human right. We must embark upon provision of adequate and affordable housing.
The question is how do we attain that degree of adequacy and affordability? Ask yourself, what are the basic things a man needs in a house? Must the floor be made of marble? Must we use concrete blocks? Must we use long span roofing sheets when there’re alternatives? We have to source esthetically, comfortable alternative materials and technologies and adopt them in provision of housing.
Government gives out land, instead of building, the developer partitions the land and sell. Government doesn’t do anything about it.
Government gives land to the man who says he’s going to do mass housing. Is mass housing duplexes? Mass housing must be affordably produced. Mass housing is supposed to be one-bedroom, two-bedroom. It’s working in several countries in the world. Our mortgage institution is not well tailored. It doesn’t support the common man to afford a mortgage. The same groups of people buy the houses and rent them to the poor. Drive from the airport, from Kuje, look to the left, look to the right. You see duplexes, fine bungalows.
Is this government’s failure?
It’s government’s because there’s poor planning, poor monitoring, poor control! In the UK, for example, you can’t occupy two council flats at the same time. Once you can afford your own house, the council flat is taken away from you and given to those who can’t afford the type of second home you’ve acquired.
Then we must encourage people to build their own houses.
How can that be done?
A lot of people with a plot of land somewhere can put up a small apartment on their own. But in a place like Abuja, where’s the land? If you’re given a piece of land in Bwari, even if you’re doing one-year-one-block, in five years, you’ll have become a landlord.
One major index for measuring development and the strength of an economy is housing. Look at when the housing sector collapsed, there was crisis in the entire global economy. The banks, everything were affected. As the housing sector picked up…do you know why? When you build a small hut, you provide employment for labourers, masons, painters, iron benders, carpenters – even the lady who sells food by the road – she cooks the food labourers eat.
Government recently launched the mortgage refinancing company. Do you look at this as solution when we already have an existing mortgage system?
Government’s belief is that it’s an intervention to encourage the mortgage institution to do what it’s supposed to do. It’s to refinance this programme just like you have the reinsurance scheme. It’s supposed to be a form of guarantee to encourage them to be as liberal as possible.
The problem in this country is the idea will be so grand but having it implemented becomes another thing. You’ll be surprised that the funds for this mortgage refinancing will end up in the pockets of few mortgage institutions. The ones that reach out to the common man will not get it.
We must also not forget. We tend to talk about housing only for those living in Abuja, Lagos, Sokoto, Maiduguri, Onitsha, Aba – the common man in the village also needs housing. He needs comfort. It’s because we haven’t provided the basic comfort that makes everyone want to move to the city. We must talk about housing in the rural areas.
Sixty percent of our population do not reside in the big cities. Of those in the big cities, 20 of them don’t need to be here if adequate amenities are provided for them outside the cities.
The current minister talks about land swap. A developer is given a district to build infrastructure. Fears are that this will make houses still expensive.
The cost of infrastructure at times outweighs the cost of building a basic house. Government needs to rethink and ask itself, is it about affordability or just providing houses. No matter the number of houses you build in this Abuja, there’re people that will take them all up and begin to rent them.
Some use them to launder their ill-gotten wealth. So even if you build 20 houses here now, one man will come – money that nobody knows where it’s from will pay from his pocket. I feel ashamed when I pass and see how people are living. I had cause to extend electricity to some of them – basic electricity. Let children have light to read and do homework.
There’re people that have more than one house. Some of them are civil servants. While they have these houses here,they’re also living in government provided quarters or houses they bought from government at little or no cost. Our housing problem in this country is very serious.