Mr. Minister, Building Low-Cost Housing For Nigerians Is Very Viable By Festus Adebayo
The bourgeoning Affordable Housing industry in Nigeria was rudely awakened in the early hours of Monday, 24th August to the following headline, posted on ThisDay Newspapers’ online platform: “BUILDING LOW-COST HOUSES FOR NIGERIANS IS NOT VIABLE, SAYS FASHOLA.”
Quoting the Honorable Minister of Housing from an earlier interview on Arise Television, the Minister contended that building low-cost houses for Nigerians is no longer viable because the components that go into the construction of houses are not cheap.
“If you want low cost housing, where’s low cost land, low cost cement, low cost doors and low cost labour to deliver low cost housing?” he was reported to have said.
It is not entirely clear whether by this statement, the Minister was finally throwing his arms up in the air in surrender to an unassailable challenge or, whether he was merely trying to indicate that achieving decent affordable housing in Nigeria was an impossibility altogether whichever way you look at it. If the former is true, then this would only go to reinforce the assertion many have been making over the years, namely, that Government has no business in direct housing provision and should limit itself to creating an enabling environment for the private sector to do what it does better, if not best; and if the latter is true, one wonders where the teeming population in and around our cities are finding to lay their heads every night!
The Minister went on to touch on other issues such as, the need for every decision taken in the sector to be driven by hard data with adherence to market segmentation, stressing that surveys were required to ensure that houses produced were acceptable to the target market.
It is important for the Minister to know that the masses of this country, rich and poor alike voted for his party, the APC, to deliver on certain dividends of democracy, many of them presented in black and white as campaign promises, including access to Affordable Housing. Indeed, the APC manifesto as presented to the electorate in 2015 clearly promised Nigerians a million new homes every year. To say that this has hardly been achieved would be the understatement of the year!
What is more pertinent however, is the weight of the Minister’s statement as a leader and officer of the Federal Government; the Minister ought to be more sensitive to his role in leading his people to a brighter future filled with hope rather than despair, possibility rather than impossibility. That’s what good leaders do. Bringing an ‘evil’ report however factual as the 10 spies to the Promised Land did, will never help this country move forward. When JFK as President of the USA announced in 1962 that he
intended to lead his people to the moon before the end of the decade – a technologically incredulous feat that was unimaginable at the time, he said in his famous speech “…we do it not because it is easy but because it is hard.”
The Way Forward:
- It is time to put the common man back in the middle of our planning. Fashola must first of all know and acknowledge his constituency – the poor masses of this country who troop out to vote every 4 years. According to the Jo’burg-based Centre of Affordable Housing (CAHF), the lowest cost house produced by a private developer on the African continent in 2019 at a cost of $8,000 (N2,999,900) is affordable to only 26% of the urban population in Nigeria! That should make us all think of where Government interventions should be directed.
We need bold, radical solutions. Not just outside-the-box solutions, but without-a-box solutions! Everywhere in Nigeria, there are innovative solutions taking place on a small scale. We should seek them out and scale these ideas. The solutions are right here amongst us. We do not need to travel abroad to find them.
We need to create on a massive scale, low-income residential layouts with minimal infrastructure for the urban poor. Those that make peaceful change impossible (provision of organized layouts) make violent change inevitable (slums & squatter settlements).
Government should immediately GET OUT OF THE WASTEFUL CONTRACTOR-PROCUREMENT SYSTEM OF BUILDING HOUSES and focus on PPPs and the provision of a conducive enabling environment.
Ensuring that Nigerians are housed in simple, decent housing irrespective of the unavailability of ‘low cost land, low cost building materials or low cost labour’ is a must! Fashola was once SuperGovernor and ensuring that the country makes definite measurable progress towards the goal of providing low-cost housing is his job now as SuperMinister! He should do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard! Surely, putting a man in a decent home (here on planet earth for that matter) cannot be more unviable than putting a man on the moon!
It is time for Fashola to rise up to the level of leadership expected of him as our Housing Minister. Otherwise, his office let another take….
SOURCE- LEADERSHIP
