The shelter crises

You do not need to look into the statistics to accept that there is a crying housing deficit in our country. Just peer into under bridges as well as uncompleted and abandoned buildings in our major towns and cities – and you come face to face with the inescapable truth. Millions of our compatriots, without shelter, are at the mercy of the elements. Life under the bridges and uncompleted buildings is harsh and brutal.

The experts say we are 70 million housing units short in nation-wide demand for housing. In real terms, nearly half of the 150 or so million Nigerians make do without the benefits of modern housing. This clearly ranks as a scandal. It shows there is a rotten underbelly beneath the gleaming stately individual mansions in our towns and cities.

A decent accommodation, or the possibility of individuals acquiring some, is a pointer to the level of human development in every country. It is difficult not to agree with the experts that we face a housing shortage that is rapidly blooming into a crisis. Perhaps, we need not worry much about the half-sheltered and the unsheltered because they are not a threat to the well-heeled. Human history has no instance of an attempt by the denizens of under bridges and uncompleted buildings to draw public attention to their plight in a peaceful or violent demonstration.

The housing problem is an old story, really. It has been creeping up on us for a long, long time. We would be untruthful to ourselves if we pretend it has suddenly caught us unawares. The housing problem has gotten progressively nastier because a) abandoned or policy summersaults scuttled our numerous attempts to address the problem and b) we never planned for the teeming crowd from our maternity wards.

Housing experts in the second republic put our housing shortage at about 10-15 million. It grew to the current impressive figure because the need keeps rising. President Shehu Shagari, whose political party, the NPN, promised us food and shelter in its manifesto, decided to take on this challenge. He needed no one to persuade him that the denizens of under bridges and uncompleted buildings did not make a good case for how our leaders cared for or treated the struggling poor.

Shagari decided to build a uniform number of low-cost houses in either the state capital or a major town in each state of the federation. They came to be known as the Shagari houses. His target, like that of General Yakubu Gowon who also approached the problem from that perspective, was the low to middle income earner. The Shagari housing policy reconnected with the Gowon housing policy.

The president must have been as shocked as some of us that the so-called band of progressive parties rose in stout opposition to this sensible approach to the problem. The UPN governors even refused to allocate land to the president for the housing estates in their various states. They put politics over and above the simple interests of the people. The late Chief Bola Ige, the then governor of the old Oyo State, led the opposition. So, even he, one of the most brilliant politicians we ever had, submitted to the primitive demands of primitive opposition politics.

Some of these estates were completed and the houses given out to those who won them in a lottery. The estates that were not completed remain uncompleted to this day. No attempts were made by the military administration after the overthrow of Shagari to complete them. A sensible national housing policy succumbed once more to the dictates of military politics. I sometimes wonder if blinkers are part of the dress code of our leaders – military and civilian.

The point here is that it would not be fair to hold ur past leaders entirely responsible for the crisis the housing shortage has now assumed in the country. Our history of public housing throws up genuine efforts by our past leaders to ensure that the under bridges as well as uncompleted and abandoned buildings would not remain the only luxury accommodation known to many of our compatriots. The Federal Housing Authority and the Federal Mortgage Bank among others, were all sensible housing policy formulations with the primary objective of encouraging and assisting individuals and companies to share in the burden of housing the people.

The main fault with the various housing policies over the years has been the exclusion of the most vulnerable group from participating in and benefiting from these policies. Because housing loans, like all loans, are hedged in by difficult conditions, the vulnerable groups are unable to take advantage of these loans. The rich, of course, fill the void. They obtain the loans and their bank accounts fill up at the expense of the poor masses.

Private developers have moved in since 1999. Our towns and cities, especially Abuja, are replete with magnificent, sprawling housing estates. Welcome as they are as part of our human development, these estates are commercial ventures. Their owners want to make quick and good returns on their huge investments. Naturally, therefore, they target the rich and exclude the poor. And the problem remains and festers.

The public sector cannot bear the burden alone. Current political and economic wisdom strongly advocates public/private partnership. It should be possible for the federal government to articulate a new, realistic housing policy that includes the vulnerable group. Such a sensible national policy should balance the commercial interests of the private developers with the need to pull up the poor and the unsheltered. Housing for all need not be an empty slogan. We missed our millennium development goal in housing, as we did in all sectors, including health and education. Time to set in motion the process for remediation.

The federal ministry of housing is collaborating with private companies is to explore ways and means of taking up the challenge in what is billed as the first national summit on affordable housing in the country. It opens in Abuja this week. Summits, such as this, are reputed for being long on academic suggestions but pretty short on pragmatic solutions. I just hope this could prove an exception to the rule.

We can address affordable housing from two important perspectives. The first is to put the cost of building materials within the reach of everyone, including the very vulnerable group. We have not sufficiently exploited local raw materials in this respect. Our dependence on cement as the major building material is unwise. There are building research institutions with the brief to find and exploit such local materials. These institutions are now more or less consigned to the cold winter of long and almost criminal neglect. We could bring them back from the cold and use them for applied search in our quest for affordable housing, using cheap but durable local raw materials.

The other perspective is, of course, money. No one has yet found a formula that makes banks and other lending institutions lend money without collateral. The man who has no collateral for securing his loan has no chance of taking advantage of affordable housing. Catch-22?

The organisers of the summit say that it would produce “a clear, sustainable, realistic and strategic blueprint for affordable housing delivery in Nigeria.”

I have crossed my fingers.