How housing policies stifle affordability of decent homes

Experts say Nigeria’s housing development policy which is skewed towards urban areas neglects other human settlements such as rural dwellings and slums depriving many Nigerians of decent homes.

The laws, institutions and policy environment in which Nigeria’s real estate market is nested have had enormous influence on its development. This ranges from the legal right to own land, to the limits on leasing, to mortgage interest rate charged.

These various elements have cast a long and sometimes ugly shadow on the form and profitability of real estate developed. There are some generic questions related to the Land Use Act of 1978 but before those are treated a look at some current policy issues in terms of urbanisation and housing policies is important.

Recently, a panel of experts examined the problems of urbanisation, housing and policy framework needed to solve these problems.

The panel comprised Francisco Bolaji Abosede, former Commissioner, Ministry of Physical Planning & Urban Development, Lagos State; Taibat Lawson, associate professor, department of Urban & Regional Planning; Femi Johnson, President, Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria, Mustapha Njie, Managing Director/CEO TAF Africa Homes.

Others were Johnson Bade Falade, MD/ CEO Gotosearch.Com Ltd and Wole Okunfulure, former Director Federal Ministry of Lands, Housing & Urban Development, Abuja.

There was a clear consensus among the panelists that housing development has been skewed towards urban settlements, which puts pressure on urban infrastructure and keeps rural areas underdeveloped. They equally proffered solutions to reverse this trend.

Taibat Lawanson, associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Lagos, emphasised the need for shift thinking about human settlements in Nigeria.

“Human settlements are not primarily rural or urban, they are where people live. We inherited urbanisation policies from the British that do not sit well with us. For instance, the concept of Government Reserved Areas and slums are outgrowths of the colonial GRA and native settlements dichotomy”

Lawanson contended that what is urgently needed is a paradigm shift in urban planning.

“Projects like the Eko Atlantic City might have their merits but who are those going to live in such houses, the middle and high income earners. How about the low income earners? What is needed urgently is Slum upgrading” she said as the audience greeted her suggestions with thunderous applause.

To reach this goal, “our paradigm of development needs to be over-hauled, tweaked from top down to attract investors to the rural areas and from bottom up to protect interest of the people.”

Similarly, Femi Johnson, president, Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria (MBAN) argued that “we have created a wide gap between rural and urban areas, neglecting the rural areas. Lagos has a housing deficit of about two million units and sees over 600, 000 new visitors annually. What this means is that there is growing pressure on existing infrastructure in Lagos with grave consequences.”

On the dearth of infrastructure and its impact on national development, some of the panelists highlighted that one critical example of this is the fact that Abuja is not readily accessible from most parts of the country by rail. The panelists contended that every level of government should do its bit because without infrastructure there can be neither a sustainable urban development nor national development. They equally lamented the fact that there is no central sewage system in any mega-city in Nigeria.

Mustapha Njie, Managing Director/CEO, TAF Africa Homes, who superintended the African Union’s presidential villas developments in the Gambia, argued that government needs to give incentives to companies in order that they would be willing to deploy the capital needed to develop rural areas or set up businesses there.

“It is time to apply technology to manufacture houses not build them and only the private sector is capable of doing so, to attract the private sector, the right incentive system must be put in place” Njie said.

What accounts for the attraction to urban areas is largely the lack of basic social amenities such as schools capable of delivering quality education at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels and the absence of health and water facilities.

People familiar with various infrastructure development studies and reports in Nigeria such as Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, said one of the biggest challenges militating against balanced development between urban and rural settlements is the lack of conscious effort among various levels of government to synergise and drive development.

“We need urgent village renewal projects. This would entail the provision of basic infrastructure such as public toilets, health facilities, good schools and job creation. Government must realise that villages need to be consciously planned and integrated into the broad national economic development roadmaps” Obasanjo said.