Follow Us on Google
By Debo Oladimeji
Nigeria’s journey towards housing provision has been substantially characterised by motion without movement, as access to decent shelter has worsened for increasing segments of the urban population in Nigeria. The SDGs Goal 11 is plagued by unending congestion, dilapidated or lack of quantitative and qualitative social infrastructure and housing deficit.
The country is presently battling an affordable housing crisis. A severe shortage of affordable homes for low-income families has been the reason behind yearly increments in house prices and rents across the country, putting home ownership increasingly out of reach for many Nigerians and making rent so high that it is virtually impossible for renters to save.
Over the past few years, governments in the country have been attempting to crack the deficit question, but with little or no success. The housing deficit, like many deficits in Nigeria, is a question of economics (efficient allocation of resources) rather than technical know-how. This deficit has been misdiagnosed as a cost, rather than an affordability, problem. Annual rent increments have destroyed livelihoods.
On January 27, 2026, The Guardian published a front-page story, “Residents on the brink as rents spike above yearly income in major cities.” On February 3, the Wemabod held the Real Estate Outlook, with the theme “Unlocking Land and Infrastructure for Inclusive Housing.”
Since December last year, the demolition of Makoko has been going on, leading to further displacement of residents who are demanding N70 million compensation from the Lagos State government. However, government is offering N11 million, prompting the residents to march to Alausa in protest.
It was Frants Fanon who said that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. In fact, there cannot be any other time to publish “Eldorado Lost Prognosis and Therapy for Nigeria’s Real Estate Deficit,” a book on the remote and immediate causes of the deficit in the housing sector and the way forward than now. It cannot be coincidental that these things are happening at the same time.
I started writing on the housing crisis in the country after COVID-19 when I saw the frictions between tenants and landlords in Lagos. I discovered that the rental market in Nigeria had always been active, despite the lull in the real estate market, which exited a 12-quarter recession in the first quarter of 2019, but slipped again into negative growth in the following quarter.
Sustained activity in the rental market until the coming of coronavirus was understandable. A report on The State of the Real Estate Market estimated that 80 per cent of Nigeria’s 200 million population lives in rented apartments.
The report, conducted by the Poison Housing Company, reveals that, in Lagos, the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria, over 60 per cent of the city’s 20 million residents lives in rented apartments, meaning that six out of every 10 Lagosians are renters who spend over 50 per cent of their income on rents.
About 60 per cent of tenants were affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with its crippling impact on household income. The implication is that six out of every 10 renters defaulted in their rent payment or at least struggled to pay, not necessarily because they didn’t want to but because they could not pay.
Landlords, on moral and humanitarian grounds, find it difficult to push tenants out of their houses. Tenants in commercial properties do not joke with their rents, because delayed or non-payment can affect their business. In the city centre, the rent went up. Some people were uncertain of their jobs after the lockdown and those that depend on daily stipends or income cannot meet their rent obligations.
I decided to use what happened to the civil servants who were evicted from federal government estates in 2005 in Lagos to peg my book. The government torpedoes the right of first refusal. It wanted the civil servants to kowtow its monetisation policy. After the bid for the buildings were announced, the civil servants asked the government to give them the cost of the highest bidder, but the government refused and eventually evicted them from their houses.
Many of the civil servants were homeless until they eventually found their ways. This type of a book is meant to transform society. This is how writers made history. Writers, such as John Locke, an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the father of Liberalism, wrote to change things in his society.
His writing on toleration contends that religion is a matter for the individual and that the churches are voluntary associations, ruling out religious coercion and uniformity. These led to the idea of separation of church and state.
Thomas Hobbes was another influential writer, who wrote on the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651. The notion of a state of nature was an essential element of Hobbes’ social contract theories, as articulated in his book, The Leviathan 1651.
Hobbes witnessed the destruction and brutality of the English Civil War between parliamentarians and Royalists, which heavily influenced his advocacy for governance by absolute sovereignty in Leviathan, as the solution to human conflict and societal breakdown.
Like Hobbes, I viewed government primarily as a device for ensuring collective security in the housing sector.
Other News
For tenants across the country, the demand is modest, not luxury, but fairness, dignity and the assurance that having a roof over one’s head should be affordable. If you remove house rents, it is like you remove everything they have. Survival becoming a problem.
The deficit in the housing sector is said to hit 28 million. But the National Housing Data Technical Committees, inaugurated by the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, has released new housing sector data indicating that Nigeria’s housing deficit for 2025 stood at 14.925 million housing units.
The housing crisis was pinned on unfavourable housing policies, ineffective mortgage system and the Land Use Act. People blame the deficit on rising construction costs, high demand and population growth, rising labour and material costs and inadequate government investment in low-cost housing.
Other challenges include absence of a well-articulated PPP institutional and the legal framework, as self-build remains dominant in the country.
There is inadequate financing structure of the government to promote social housing programmes. The target populations for social housing programmes have low purchasing power, which also accounts for the inadequate appetite from local financial partners for social housing programmes.
The population is growing at geometric rate, while housing is growing at arithmetic progression. The 28 million deficit cannot be static, as everyday, the population growth is higher than the housing rate.
Over the years, Nigeria had embarked on a series of housing initiatives, but none had been pursued with consistency or any measurable sustainability. These unsustainable efforts must change and give way to sustainable and well-thought out initiative.
While there seems to be some a efforts towards addressing the housing deficit, most new housing construction caters for upper income households, leaving behind an acute housing shortage for middle and low income households, where the greatest need for affordable housing in urban areas lies. Houses are pricey and landlords typically require annuals. not monthly rent payment.
The IMF and World Bank are saying it is not the business of the government to go into housing. But the public housing initiative of the United Kingdom (UK) was started by the government in 1918 and as at 2014, 64.8 per cent of the UK’s 53 million people were home owners.
The Singaporean initiative was started by the government in 1960 and has provided housing for 90 per cent of its people. Approximately 90 per cent of Singaporeans own their homes today and over 80 per cent live in government-built residential units.
The government achieved this by building adequate and affordable houses enough for many residents to buy, over the years. The concept was drawn by LEE KUAN YEW and the Peoples Action Party (PAP) in 1960 to put together a Housing and Development Board Building, with over 51,031 new housing units over a five year period.
The only way we can get the housing deficit sorted is for the government to provide good quality houses at affordable rates. When people are made to own their houses, the cost of rent will certainly reduce. The government can also create an enabling environment for the private sector to operate. If the government can allocate land for the private sector to develop affordable housing for the offtakers, such as one or two bedrooms, it will help to reduce the deficit.
The government should not listen to the advice of the IMF and World Bank, which have been preaching that it leaves provision of housing entirely to the private sector.
Given our state of economic development, which is characterised by low income, high cost of construction and lack of mortgage finance, the time is not yet ripe for the government to withdraw from housing construction.
Rather, the government should even go a step further by making it possible for people to pay for these houses over a period of 15 to 30 years.
This book is meant to provide a way out of the crisis in the housing sector and it is recommended for everybody in the built industry.
Being an address presented at the unveiling of Eldorado Lost Prognosis and Therapy for Nigeria’s Real Estate Deficit by Debo Oladimeji
