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Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja
The United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Ms Leilani Farha, yesterday, gave a damning verdict on the nation’s housing sector.
Farha stated that Nigeria has a history of successive governments who make grandiose commitments to improve housing conditions and then fail to take adequate measures to realise those commitments.
She added that going by the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria’s data, it was estimated that the country currently has a deficit of 22 million housing units, a figure she said, was steadily rising as urban populations continued to increase at alarming rates. Farha said in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest urban area, about 70 per cent of the total population lives in informal housing with the housing deficit at 2.5 million units, according to the state government.
She also said in major centres such as Lagos Abuja, Ibadan and Kano, housing demand is growing by about 20 per cent each year.
“Nigeria’s housing sector is in a complete crisis. There is no current national housing action plan or strategy. Coordination and communication between federal and state governments seems lacking. “Private market housing is unaffordable for most, rental housing is scarce.It requires tenants to have one or two years’ rent in advance and there is no rent control or caps,” Farha said.
Farha who conducted an official visit to Nigeria from September 13 to 23, 2019, noted that landlord-tenant relations are loosely governed and laws that should regulate and protect the right to housing are not enforced. Earlier in her report, Farha stated that the housing conditions in Nigeria, particularly for those living in poverty, were grossly inadequate.
Farha disclosed that she was shocked to see such inhumane and insufferable housing conditions in the 21st century, particularly in an oil producing country, showing relatively strong economic growth.
She noted that economic inequality in the country had reached extreme levels in Nigeria, adding that in July 2019, Oxfam reported that close to 70 per cent of the nation’s population lives below the poverty line.
Farha also recalled the Brookings Institute’s estimate of 87 million Nigerians amounting to 43 percent of the Nigerian population living in extreme poverty on $1.25 per day or less, with the figure growing by six people every minute.
She also recalled that in 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 69 per cent of the urban population of Nigeria was living in slums, many of which lacked even the most basic of services such as portable water, sanitation services, electricity, garbage collection, and paved roads.
The UN Special Rapporteur, however, said at the same time Nigeria is the 29th largest economy in the world, just behind Norway and well ahead of countries like Singapore and Malaysia, even as she said Nigeria is considered one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Farha further said the inequality in the country was widely attributed to several factors such as corruption and mismanagement of public funds and a failure to implement just tax policies whereby low-income earners pay disproportionately more taxes than do high earning corporations.
In her recommendations, the UN Special Rapporteur, amongst others, stated that given the rapid demographic growth and internal migration, the government must immediately green light the collection of impartial census data.
