How Fashola can build sustainably for majority, vulnerable at low cost

Suggestion has been put forward on how Babatunde Fashola, Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Works and Housing can build sustainably and at low cost for the majority and most vulnerable Nigerians who are the target of the Federal Government’s planned intervention in the housing sector.

The minister had, at the unveiling of his ministry’s roadmap on housing, in Abuja recently, disclosed that his plan was to build for the majority and the most vulnerable Nigerians whose income cannot support or afford what is on offer in the open market at the moment.

“These are people who graduated from Universities about five years ago and more; people who are in the income bracket of grade level 9 to 15 in the public service and their counterparts,including taxi drivers, market men and women, farmers, artisans who earn the same range of income”, he explained.

Many stakeholders in the housing sector have hailed this move as a positive development, but Femi Akintunde, MD/CEO, AMFacilities Limited, advises that “this good intent must be balanced with reality of execution”, wondering where the capacity to see through all the houses that are to be built and the materials that will go into them will come from.

“If the government has articulated all of this and put them in place, that is well and good, but we have to evolve a system similar to what operates in other jurisdictions, especially in the UK.  Government should identify a good and reputable developer and use what they have to get what they want. Developers need land in good locations for which they pay highly given the difficulty in land ownership   in this environment”, he noted.

Akintunde explained that government should provide land for the developer in an area he is interested in developing housing and if he chooses places like Ikoyi or Victoria Island, for instance, and government has five hectares of land there selling for N100 million per hectare, it could sell this land for N70 million per hectare to the developer.

“If the developer is building 10,000 luxury homes, he has to incorporate 1,000 social housing for government in that same location. This makes up for the N30 million difference in the price of the land sold. By this arrangement, government is leveraging the project management capability of the developer using the land it has to get the social housing that it needs for its people”, he advised.

By this arrangement also, he continued, government will not only be addressing the people’s housing needs at very low cost, but also closing the inequality gap between the rich and the poor and also encouraging social cohesion and bonding among different classes of people.

Noting that all these things are done in other jurisdictions, Akintunde cited instance of St George, a reputable developer in London,  which got a large tranche of land that the government reclaimed from where hoodlums used to gather, disclosing that the developer has turned that ‘slum’ into a city with different house-types for different classes of people.

“I believe we have good people in government now, but they need more than ideas. They should build capacity; they need structures that work; they need strategists to support what they have. They have to tap into areas where strategy and expertise have been proven because a lot of people have done all these things successfully”, he advised.