Fashola to end housing deficit with aggressive national intervention policy

Minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, has said his ministry will lead an aggressive intervention scheme aimed at increasing the supply of shelter for Nigerians through the construction of public housing, while formulating policies that will lead to more private sector participation and ownership to reduce the chronic housing deficit currently plaguing the country.

Fashola spoke Tuesday during his first media briefing at the ministry of power headquarters in Abuja.

“In the housing sector, if we complete our ongoing projects, and we get land from the governors in all states and the FCT to start doing what we know, using the LagosHoms model, we should start 40 blocks of housing in each state and the FCT,” he said.

According to him, the state governors are expected to play a critical role in the policy by providing land of around 5 to 10 hectares for a start, with title documents and access roads, or a commitment that they will build the access roads by the time the houses are completed in lieu of access roads.

This, he said, has the potential to deliver 12 flats per block and 480 flats per state, amounting to a total of 17,760 flats nationwide, just for a start.

Employment wise, this will mean that, at a conservative minimum of 4 doors and 2 windows per home, as well as a demand for 71,040 doors and 35,520 windows to be locally made nationwide in year one.

“The demand for those who will make and fix the doors and window, the hinges, the wood polish and the paint and tiles suggest the onset of jobs and change for our artisans and workers who are the real builders of every economy,” Fashola said.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is said to have a housing deficit of 17 million homes.

Fashola said those numbers need to be verified and that a process of scientific assessment would be undertaken to define the accuracy of that data as well as the actual demand.

In Singapore, a small country of about 3 million people, a home ownership programme has been consistently implemented since 1960, successfully accommodating 80 percent of the 3 million people as of 2013.

This will require a change in the budget for national housing from the N1.8 billion in 2015 to something in the hundreds of billions of naira that matches the current policy ambition.

According to Fashola, “If we can spend N10 billion in each state and the FCT on housing alone every year subject to (a) the capacity to raise the money and (b) the capacity to utilise the funds having regards to our current construction methods and the time it takes to complete construction, which our ministry intends to change by research and industrialisation of housing.”

The minister argued further that sustainability was critical to solving the Nigerian housing problem.

One component of sustainability is that to be able to repeat what has been done, which means that housing cost must be recovered even if there is no profit, so that the government can build more.

Another critical factor is to decide whether those without income can legitimately expect to own a home, without abdicating the government’s responsibility to increase the capacity of the economy to employ more people.

The focus here is particularly on addressing the economic commitments of change by stimulating jobs across the states, especially for low income people like bricklayers, welders, carpenters, plumbers, and vendors, who live on the economic margins of society.

The re-designing of existing housing roof types is also being considered to make them ready to receive solar panels for electricity without damaging the roofs or causing leakages during installation.

This is expected to open a new vista for the local manufacture of solar panels and create other jobs at manufacturing, distributorship and installation levels, especially for technicians.