Nigeria needs a more enduring housing policy

In the last six decades since the country’s independence, one thing that has eluded the nation is an enduring housing policy that would guarantee the majority of the citizens affordable houses no matter their status.

At least since the Second Republic, Nigerians have seen successive governments come up with housing programmes that were designed to address the widening housing deficit in the country. Unfortunately, each of the programmes ended without achieving the desired result.

A recent report by this newspaper is a case in point. According to the report published on April 7, 2024, many of the houses constructed by the past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, have remained unoccupied and are rotting away in many states of the federation.

According to the investigation, the government had awarded contract for the construction of 6,022 different categories of houses in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. Of this number, 2,864 units have been completed while the others are at various stages of construction. 

However, many of those completed have remained unoccupied, with some vandalised by hoodlums. A number have had their roofs blown off by wind. Residents, who spoke to the paper, said many of them could not afford the cost of the houses being demanded by the government, while some said they were not designed to suit their environment or were located far away from the towns. This scenario has been a recurring issue over time with successive governments.

Most of these programmes suffered lack of deep understanding of the needs of Nigerians or were largely conceived and executed for the benefit of contractors and their sponsors – the politicians. Some suffered from the politics of the day which saw actors belonging to different political divides sabotaging such programmes. As such, from the Second Republic to date, almost each successive government came up with a housing programme, which at the end, left the nation with abandoned or poorly executed houses. The nation at the end incurred huge losses while contractors and their associates smiled to the banks.

The present administration also launched its own housing programme with the ground breaking of the construction of 3,112 houses in Abuja. The government said it would build another 20, 000 houses in Lagos and 250 units in two states in each of the six geo-political zones. However, the government has so far been silent about the fate of the projects embarked upon by the past administration and what it would do to sustain the programme beyond its term in office.

Daily Trust believes there is a need to do a thorough assessment of all housing projects with a view to avoiding past pitfalls. Additionally, government needs to streamline the number of those who could engage in developing mass houses. One major problem is the fact that the nation has too many bodies charged with housing delivery. Apart from the various housing authorities set up at federal and state levels with the responsibility of delivering houses, many government agencies also got involved without the necessary professionals to execute such projects.

Worse still, the nation does not have a national housing policy that would spell out specific roles for each arm of government and the level of involvement of the private sector in housing delivery. We, therefore, call on the federal government to design and launch a housing policy for the nation, which would take into cognisance the role of all stakeholders in the housing sector. For now, it should put an immediate end to the practice where every agency wakes up and embarks on building construction.

It is also pertinent to reinvigorate the role of agencies such as the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMB) and the Federal Housing Authority to execute their tasks in ensuring the delivery of adequate houses for Nigerians. The FMB should adhere strictly to its role of providing finance to individuals and relevant organisations to build houses. It should also make its work more transparent to enable Nigerians interested to access its loans. State governments also need to reactivate their respective housing agencies to key into the nation’s housing programme.

With a housing deficit of seven million units in 1991; 12 million units in 2007; 14 million units in 2010; 20 million units in 2018 and 28 million units in 2023, governments need to do more to address the housing problem faced by the average Nigerian. This requires careful and rational planning, not ad hoc measures.