Fresh intervention in low cost housing underway as LCHDA debuts

A fresh push aimed at intervening in low cost housing provision for low income earners in Nigerian is underway as Low Cost Housing Developers Association (LCHDA), a group out to reduce the cost of housing for Nigerians to the lowest possible level, has been launched in Lagos.

The association which comprises major stakeholders in the housing industry ranging from the professionals and  skilled  labour to the artisans has notable professionals in its fold including architects, lawyers, building technologists, builders, civil engineers and others in the industry.

Emmanuel Ogheide, the initiator of the programme, explained at the launch of the association recently that “this is a group of people who have come together to give back to society by making housing affordable, mostly by offering their expertise.

“What we are out to do essentially is to touch lives in the society through the provision of accommodation. To get this done, we realised that a lot of people need housing or housing services, but the challenge is that it is beyond what they can afford and, to make it affordable, we have to come together as a group to ensures that the average person, the low income household or individual, is able to afford and live in a decent accommodation,” he said.

According to him, “there are a lot of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) making things happen in the health sector, education, environment, sports etc which are good; we don’t have problems with that;  but no one is looking at this critical sector—housing .

“We think it’s time we began to look at the rate at which Nigerians are becoming homeless; some Nigerians live in houses that are not conducive for human habitation,” he lamented.

“As an association, we believed that having a decent accommodation is a right, not a privilege; everyone should live in a decent accommodation; but how can we talk about living in a decent accommodation when a civil service worker lives on minimum wage of N18, 000 per month?”, he queried.

Continuing, he wondered  how such a person could afford a decent accommodation,  pointing out that going by the current situation in the country, many people would not be able to own houses  in their life time and neither will they live in decent accommodation because the so called minimum wage that the government pays cannot hardly sustain their  feeding needs.

Ogheide cited Article 25, Subsection 1 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of the United Nations which says that “everyone has a right to a standard of living, adequate to the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family including school, clothing, housing, medical care and basic social services, and the right to security at the event of unemployment or old age and lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond their control”.

“So everyone, whether working or not has a right to housing which is why governments all over the world are coming together to provide what is called Low Cost Housing. In some places, government funds it, in some places it is one of the ways mortgage institutions give back to society. In some places, it is the NGOs that come together to initiate this scheme for the benefit of the larger society.”

On how this initiative is to be funded,  Ogheide  disclosed that his group was talking with some international organizations such as the United Nations Habitat (UNHabitat)—an organ of the United Nations  responsible for human settlements.

“They invited me to two of their programmes on June 29; one in South Africa and another in Switzerland.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to any of them because of some engagements back home; we had programmes that demanded I should stay back.

From this you can see that we are getting support from outside and if the United Nations is giving us the necessary support, why not Nigerian government; why not religious organizations?”, he queried, stressing that this initiative was not something they could do alone.