By Maduka Nweke
The acute shortage of housing in the country has reached the crises dimensions. Most Nigerians in the metropolis will now have to choose between going to the villages to live or brace up for skyrocketing price of accommodation.
In this guise, the National President of Building Collapse Prevention Guild (BCPG). Mr. Sulaimon Yusuf, opined that it is only government’s intervention in the real estate sector that can crash the price of housing in the country. He said that what contributes to increase the cost of housing in the country is the procurement of land, provision of infrastructures and the likes.
According to him, “the work of Federal Housing Authority (FHA) is to provide houses. You can see what the Ministry is doing, giving land to consultants to build houses in all the states of the federation. These are the impacts that we feel, safe for those states who have not been able to give land to federal government, houses are not built there. So, now, when you look at the performance, you say okay, for those states that have provided land, they were able to provide houses through Private Partnerships Projects (PPP).
In that regard, state governments should be able to provide the land for housing construction in addition to provision of infrastructure in such areas. Lamenting the dearth of data, Yusuf said that Nigeria does not know the number of housing deficit in the country to be able to bridge the gap.
“First and foremost, we have problem of data.
You see, for us to say we have shortfall in shelter, there must be adequate data in terms of how many are we? Then, what is the stratum of that population, where are this population? From there, you can now determine the actual deficiency that we have. But what we now have is people on their own crazy to buy land.
Even the estate developers, what they do is looking for land especially in Lagos here because I know the rate at which they are building in Lagos is not the same at which they build in Ibadan, in Akure and other city centres or Abeokuta.
“The rate differs. This is because we have special case in Lagos. Everything is profitable in Lagos and so people see housing as one of the profitable ventures. They knew that if they put it down, people will buy and this is why you see people building all over the places. The estate developers, everybody are just running up here and there building houses, selling them and making money. If you want to make a quick one, you go to real estate. That is why you see all of them making money from all sources and bringing them to build houses and make money.
Go to Lekki corridor you will imagine yourself whether, with all these houses why are we still having housing deficits? They are not building room and parlour, they are building duplexes, flats. Those people that are building houses are not that category of people.