Housing crisis in Nigeria needs urgent govt intervention –Adediji
Bode Adediji is the Group Executive Chairman of Bode Adediji Partnership, Kontinental Developers Nigeria Limited, and House of Estate Limited. He is also the immediate past president of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV) and a seasoned real estate professional. In this interview with Correspondent, TEMIDAYO AKINSUYI, he bares his mind on issues on housing challenges in Nigeria and in events in the real estate industry. Excerpts:
It has been over a year since you left office as a two-term president of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers. What have you been doing ever since?
I have been concentrating on those areas I was unable to pay attention to due to my busy schedule during my presidency, paramount among which is to raise my company and subsidiaries to a new level. I thank God we are achieving that. Also, I am contributing through my engagements in other social organisations in ensuring that we brainstorm and proffer solutions to problems and challenges that are affecting the country. Having said that, I remain a member of the National Council by virtue of my position as the immediate past president of the institution. I still give my best to my professional body as a member of the council and of course as the chairman of the Privileges and Membership Committee. From time to time, I discover that my time is occupied just as it was during my tenure as president of the institution.
It has been reported that Nigeria currently has a housing deficit 17 million units, don’t you think is a worrisome trend?
Let me just tell you about these figures that both the government, the professionals and of course, the news media bandied about. You do not need to refer to any specific figure to appreciate the level of the housing crisis facing Nigeria. You only need to look around you and see how many people sleep under the bridges throughout the country. What has been the growth of the population in the so-called slum areas throughout the federation? What has been the impact of displaced people, who have migrated from trouble-prone areas to fairly peaceful and stable areas? When you bring all this into calculation, you will now know that Nigeria is a country, which has constantly paid lip service to housing delivery rather than confronting the monster headlong.
Now what solutions can you proffer to effectively tackle this challenge?
The era in which any government or even the people of Nigeria will engage in mere policy formulation, mere propaganda in terms of the governor opening just 20 housing units and the entire media in the country is mobilised to publicise and popularise it, the era of grandstanding where you know you have a major problem on hand, but all you can do is to talk about it without actually looking at the severity of it vis-à-vis the impact from other major challenges you are trying to resolve. For example, I have been a persistent and consistent campaigner that until we achieve a modicum of success in the housing sector, all our efforts in tackling issues like unemployment, insecurity, decline in the standard of education will continue to be compromised. How do you expect students to study and excel when the housing condition under which they live either on the campus or outside is unthinkable? How do you expect security to be effective where a majority of Nigerians are people of no fixed abode? People migrate because of having crisis from time to time. So, these are the challenges that housing on its own create for other areas of national concern and until we look at Nigeria’s problems holistically, we will just find out that in our concentration of efforts in those areas we consider as key and critical, we are ignoring those other areas which would have complemented our efforts in that direction paramount of which is the area of housing.
The Federal Government has created a Ministry of Housing; do you think the Minister has not been effective in dealing with the crisis of housing in the country?
I think the nature and magnitude of housing crisis has gone beyond stereotyping the background of anybody, who is there as a Minister. I make bold to say and I want to emphasise the fact that the housing problem in Nigeria has gone beyond ministerial level. It has to be addressed from the highest authority in the land and I am not seeing anything new. When it dawned on former president Olusegun Obasanjo that the direction in which the housing crisis was going then was becoming unthinkable, he literally bypassed the then Ministry of Housing and set up a presidential group to look into the housing crisis in Nigeria, headed by then governor of Rivers State, Dr. Peter Odili. But because we as a people do not have the capacity to sustain initiatives until we actually get to the logical conclusion of any challenges facing us, all these things will just crop up and fizzle out. For me, it is essential for Mr. President to really set up a mega panel to look at housing crisis in all its dimensions and create a timeframe during which this monster would have been demolished. And when you look at the problem on one side, you then look at the solution too. This is the only country that I can think of that we have not looked at providing solution to housing problem from all available resources. For instance, we know that we have a bulk of our high net worth individuals residing abroad. And as of last week I think, they said that the home remittance to Nigeria by Nigerians in Diaspora was about $40 billion. What proportion of this money can we consciously create an enabling environment to tap into in terms of provision of houses? If for instance, all federal, state and local government housing estates and private multinationals must have a section to take up the interest of those in Diaspora, that will be another avenue where you are attracting flow of funds. But there is no template on the ground to capture that now. And the only people who can speak on this kind of matter authoritatively are people like me who have devoted all our lives to housing, which is to say that when look at all organs of government in terms of housing, you have to question the manpower being deployed to tackle it but limiting it to the ministerial level, I will like to disagree. You look at it comprehensively and say ‘okay, this is a national shame that must be solved without wasting further time’. You look at it again; we have been saying that a nation that lacks the capacity to produce internally the bulk of our building materials can only dream of solving housing problems, because we can never solve it. And we have everything that one can have to actually build internal capacity to ensure that 90 per cent of anything we are going to use for housing in this country today is made right here in Nigeria. Thank goodness though the prices are high, but through the efforts of Aliko Dangote, the challenge of unabashed importation of cement into the country has been drastically minimised. So, if you extend that to aluminum, plant and equipment, even to glass, then you will be near enough to the Promised Land. The other one, which I have always said to people, is that Nigeria is now growing at almost 70 per cent of the GDP without any significant contribution from the constriction and housing sector. The truth of the matter is this, until at the highest level of governance in this country, we take the issue of housing seriously from the mortgage perspective and banish the mentality and scourge of cash and carry, we will not be able to actually tackle housing problem in this country. In the year 2013, Nigeria largely speaking, still engage in the culture and practice of cash and carry when it comes to home ownership. There is no country in the world where housing delivery has become successful in the absence of a virile mortgage institution. If you look at the advanced nations, the real sector, housing and mortgage account for more than 30 per cent of their GDP. For instance, take a look at mortgage; virtually more than 60 per cent of its populace has exposure to mortgage whether in terms of their primary house, secondary or even their place of work. What we inherited from independence is the cash and carry economy and it is what we still operate today. To me, it is an unfortunate reflection of our level of seriousness. We have spoken so much about mortgage institution in this country but little is happening on the ground and it is unfortunate in the sense that one would have expected that as our banking system has migrated from the pedantic platform into a credible institute that can rival with any financial institution in the world, concurrently the mortgage aspect or the financial market should have grown. But this is not so and until you cure the mortgage albatross in Nigeria; the fight against corruption will be difficult to win. That is to let you know the interconnectedness of the housing sector to the growth and development of other relevant sectors in the country.
What is your take on public-private partnership option in tackling the housing problem?
It is good to talk about PPP, it is probably the rule that now governs project implementation even in advanced countries, but have we taken care of the fundamental steps that can serve as infrastructure to midwife the PPP? The answer is no. Number one, access to land in this country is still as Herculean as it used to be 20 years ago before the Land Use Act. With the entire proposal for amendment in the National Assembly what has become of it? Nothing.
Secondly, before talking about PPP, look at the cost of construction, especially from the perspective of the internal capacity. Today, 70 per cent of building materials in the country are still imported. So, even if you want to go on PPP, you must address it from the angle of competitiveness, implementation timeframe and cost efficiency, else there will be a problem; houses will be outside the purchasing power of the ordinary people, and so, PPP will be dead on arrival. So, there are so many problems that are hampering the acceptance of PPP in Nigeria.
During the tenure of Lateef Jakande, we witnessed a lot of low cost housing estate in Lagos State, why do you think it has been difficult for successive administrations to replicate this noble gesture for the populace?
Times have changed. For you to build credible low cost housing now on a massive scale, a lot of institutional changes must take place. Don’t forget that that was an era when you have battalions of bungalow. Some of them fairly well built. Majority of which are inadequately built. But when you look at the contemporary land market and the amount of money required even to build ramshackle houses, the concept of low cost housing between the First Republic era will not actually be the case. For me, what Nigeria should look at now is that as the value of our land rises, you have to contemplate the concept of vertical growth. In all densely populated countries of the world, they don’t actually rely on building of bungalows for individuals. What they have is massive high-rise whether you talk about Taiwan, China or Malaysia; they don’t have the 20, 30-storey block of flats. Anything from five to 10 plots that people can build, where you can actually have about 20 to 30 families in a single block. That is the trend.
What solution can you proffer to the incessant cases of building collapse in the country?
I want to be definite about the tragedy of building collapse in Nigeria. The proportion of houses that is collapsing was built some 20,30, 40 years ago. The solution you have to cure that ailment is different from the solution you have concerning those recently built houses that are collapsing. My opinion and recommendation is that there must be a national survey of susceptible buildings across the nation, backed up by manpower, backed up with budget and backed up by political will. All those three things are lacking in Nigeria. Lagos State Government is trying its best but you now find that even in Abuja and elsewhere, the incidence of building collapse is on the increase. I am not even concerned in my own case about material laws attendant to such collapse of buildings, I am more worried about a nation waking up and finding some human beings, our brothers and sisters being trapped in a he pile of iron and concrete where we lack the capacity and technical know-how to come to their rescue until they are dead. The real responsibility of government is to make citizens safe; there is no budget too outrageous to put this shame behind us. It is their turn today, who knows whose turn it is tomorrow? So, that is the angle I have always viewed the incidence of building collapse. It requires a robust and sustainable participation of government, professional bodies and the populace, because in many of the neighborhoods, houses that are waiting to suffer the ill-fate of collapse are known even to the ordinary men and women but they lack the capacity to intervene. The other issue is that for now, there could have been a budget that wherever we suspect a house is about to collapse, government has not only the power to evacuate the people but has the capacity and humaneness to provide alternatives no matter how temporary. Do we have that nationwide? The answer is no.
Housing and infrastructure construction have been identified as major tools of development in developed and emerging economies. Is there hope that housing will develop the Nigeria economy?
Yes, there is hope but Nigeria has a problem, which is ‘over-endowment’. That is why an average Nigerian wants to be seen talking and not working. We have a country of almost one million square kilometres of land with about seven kilometres of coastline and billions in oil reserves, and by the time you go into agriculture-friendly nations, few countries can beat Nigeria. Why is a country so endowed still dependent on imported food to feed the populace? Nigeria is peculiar in nature, it is the only country where all the problems are known, all the solutions and resources to be deployed to tackle the problems are available, but nothing is being done. That is the area where Nigeria presents what is called global dilemma.
Source: Daily Independent
It has been over a year since you left office as a two-term president of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers. What have you been doing ever since?
I have been concentrating on those areas I was unable to pay attention to due to my busy schedule during my presidency, paramount among which is to raise my company and subsidiaries to a new level. I thank God we are achieving that. Also, I am contributing through my engagements in other social organisations in ensuring that we brainstorm and proffer solutions to problems and challenges that are affecting the country. Having said that, I remain a member of the National Council by virtue of my position as the immediate past president of the institution. I still give my best to my professional body as a member of the council and of course as the chairman of the Privileges and Membership Committee. From time to time, I discover that my time is occupied just as it was during my tenure as president of the institution.
It has been reported that Nigeria currently has a housing deficit 17 million units, don’t you think is a worrisome trend?
Let me just tell you about these figures that both the government, the professionals and of course, the news media bandied about. You do not need to refer to any specific figure to appreciate the level of the housing crisis facing Nigeria. You only need to look around you and see how many people sleep under the bridges throughout the country. What has been the growth of the population in the so-called slum areas throughout the federation? What has been the impact of displaced people, who have migrated from trouble-prone areas to fairly peaceful and stable areas? When you bring all this into calculation, you will now know that Nigeria is a country, which has constantly paid lip service to housing delivery rather than confronting the monster headlong.
Now what solutions can you proffer to effectively tackle this challenge?
The era in which any government or even the people of Nigeria will engage in mere policy formulation, mere propaganda in terms of the governor opening just 20 housing units and the entire media in the country is mobilised to publicise and popularise it, the era of grandstanding where you know you have a major problem on hand, but all you can do is to talk about it without actually looking at the severity of it vis-à-vis the impact from other major challenges you are trying to resolve. For example, I have been a persistent and consistent campaigner that until we achieve a modicum of success in the housing sector, all our efforts in tackling issues like unemployment, insecurity, decline in the standard of education will continue to be compromised. How do you expect students to study and excel when the housing condition under which they live either on the campus or outside is unthinkable? How do you expect security to be effective where a majority of Nigerians are people of no fixed abode? People migrate because of having crisis from time to time. So, these are the challenges that housing on its own create for other areas of national concern and until we look at Nigeria’s problems holistically, we will just find out that in our concentration of efforts in those areas we consider as key and critical, we are ignoring those other areas which would have complemented our efforts in that direction paramount of which is the area of housing.
The Federal Government has created a Ministry of Housing; do you think the Minister has not been effective in dealing with the crisis of housing in the country?
I think the nature and magnitude of housing crisis has gone beyond stereotyping the background of anybody, who is there as a Minister. I make bold to say and I want to emphasise the fact that the housing problem in Nigeria has gone beyond ministerial level. It has to be addressed from the highest authority in the land and I am not seeing anything new. When it dawned on former president Olusegun Obasanjo that the direction in which the housing crisis was going then was becoming unthinkable, he literally bypassed the then Ministry of Housing and set up a presidential group to look into the housing crisis in Nigeria, headed by then governor of Rivers State, Dr. Peter Odili. But because we as a people do not have the capacity to sustain initiatives until we actually get to the logical conclusion of any challenges facing us, all these things will just crop up and fizzle out. For me, it is essential for Mr. President to really set up a mega panel to look at housing crisis in all its dimensions and create a timeframe during which this monster would have been demolished. And when you look at the problem on one side, you then look at the solution too. This is the only country that I can think of that we have not looked at providing solution to housing problem from all available resources. For instance, we know that we have a bulk of our high net worth individuals residing abroad. And as of last week I think, they said that the home remittance to Nigeria by Nigerians in Diaspora was about $40 billion. What proportion of this money can we consciously create an enabling environment to tap into in terms of provision of houses? If for instance, all federal, state and local government housing estates and private multinationals must have a section to take up the interest of those in Diaspora, that will be another avenue where you are attracting flow of funds. But there is no template on the ground to capture that now. And the only people who can speak on this kind of matter authoritatively are people like me who have devoted all our lives to housing, which is to say that when look at all organs of government in terms of housing, you have to question the manpower being deployed to tackle it but limiting it to the ministerial level, I will like to disagree. You look at it comprehensively and say ‘okay, this is a national shame that must be solved without wasting further time’. You look at it again; we have been saying that a nation that lacks the capacity to produce internally the bulk of our building materials can only dream of solving housing problems, because we can never solve it. And we have everything that one can have to actually build internal capacity to ensure that 90 per cent of anything we are going to use for housing in this country today is made right here in Nigeria. Thank goodness though the prices are high, but through the efforts of Aliko Dangote, the challenge of unabashed importation of cement into the country has been drastically minimised. So, if you extend that to aluminum, plant and equipment, even to glass, then you will be near enough to the Promised Land. The other one, which I have always said to people, is that Nigeria is now growing at almost 70 per cent of the GDP without any significant contribution from the constriction and housing sector. The truth of the matter is this, until at the highest level of governance in this country, we take the issue of housing seriously from the mortgage perspective and banish the mentality and scourge of cash and carry, we will not be able to actually tackle housing problem in this country. In the year 2013, Nigeria largely speaking, still engage in the culture and practice of cash and carry when it comes to home ownership. There is no country in the world where housing delivery has become successful in the absence of a virile mortgage institution. If you look at the advanced nations, the real sector, housing and mortgage account for more than 30 per cent of their GDP. For instance, take a look at mortgage; virtually more than 60 per cent of its populace has exposure to mortgage whether in terms of their primary house, secondary or even their place of work. What we inherited from independence is the cash and carry economy and it is what we still operate today. To me, it is an unfortunate reflection of our level of seriousness. We have spoken so much about mortgage institution in this country but little is happening on the ground and it is unfortunate in the sense that one would have expected that as our banking system has migrated from the pedantic platform into a credible institute that can rival with any financial institution in the world, concurrently the mortgage aspect or the financial market should have grown. But this is not so and until you cure the mortgage albatross in Nigeria; the fight against corruption will be difficult to win. That is to let you know the interconnectedness of the housing sector to the growth and development of other relevant sectors in the country.
What is your take on public-private partnership option in tackling the housing problem?
It is good to talk about PPP, it is probably the rule that now governs project implementation even in advanced countries, but have we taken care of the fundamental steps that can serve as infrastructure to midwife the PPP? The answer is no. Number one, access to land in this country is still as Herculean as it used to be 20 years ago before the Land Use Act. With the entire proposal for amendment in the National Assembly what has become of it? Nothing.
Secondly, before talking about PPP, look at the cost of construction, especially from the perspective of the internal capacity. Today, 70 per cent of building materials in the country are still imported. So, even if you want to go on PPP, you must address it from the angle of competitiveness, implementation timeframe and cost efficiency, else there will be a problem; houses will be outside the purchasing power of the ordinary people, and so, PPP will be dead on arrival. So, there are so many problems that are hampering the acceptance of PPP in Nigeria.
During the tenure of Lateef Jakande, we witnessed a lot of low cost housing estate in Lagos State, why do you think it has been difficult for successive administrations to replicate this noble gesture for the populace?
Times have changed. For you to build credible low cost housing now on a massive scale, a lot of institutional changes must take place. Don’t forget that that was an era when you have battalions of bungalow. Some of them fairly well built. Majority of which are inadequately built. But when you look at the contemporary land market and the amount of money required even to build ramshackle houses, the concept of low cost housing between the First Republic era will not actually be the case. For me, what Nigeria should look at now is that as the value of our land rises, you have to contemplate the concept of vertical growth. In all densely populated countries of the world, they don’t actually rely on building of bungalows for individuals. What they have is massive high-rise whether you talk about Taiwan, China or Malaysia; they don’t have the 20, 30-storey block of flats. Anything from five to 10 plots that people can build, where you can actually have about 20 to 30 families in a single block. That is the trend.
What solution can you proffer to the incessant cases of building collapse in the country?
I want to be definite about the tragedy of building collapse in Nigeria. The proportion of houses that is collapsing was built some 20,30, 40 years ago. The solution you have to cure that ailment is different from the solution you have concerning those recently built houses that are collapsing. My opinion and recommendation is that there must be a national survey of susceptible buildings across the nation, backed up by manpower, backed up with budget and backed up by political will. All those three things are lacking in Nigeria. Lagos State Government is trying its best but you now find that even in Abuja and elsewhere, the incidence of building collapse is on the increase. I am not even concerned in my own case about material laws attendant to such collapse of buildings, I am more worried about a nation waking up and finding some human beings, our brothers and sisters being trapped in a he pile of iron and concrete where we lack the capacity and technical know-how to come to their rescue until they are dead. The real responsibility of government is to make citizens safe; there is no budget too outrageous to put this shame behind us. It is their turn today, who knows whose turn it is tomorrow? So, that is the angle I have always viewed the incidence of building collapse. It requires a robust and sustainable participation of government, professional bodies and the populace, because in many of the neighborhoods, houses that are waiting to suffer the ill-fate of collapse are known even to the ordinary men and women but they lack the capacity to intervene. The other issue is that for now, there could have been a budget that wherever we suspect a house is about to collapse, government has not only the power to evacuate the people but has the capacity and humaneness to provide alternatives no matter how temporary. Do we have that nationwide? The answer is no.
Housing and infrastructure construction have been identified as major tools of development in developed and emerging economies. Is there hope that housing will develop the Nigeria economy?
Yes, there is hope but Nigeria has a problem, which is ‘over-endowment’. That is why an average Nigerian wants to be seen talking and not working. We have a country of almost one million square kilometres of land with about seven kilometres of coastline and billions in oil reserves, and by the time you go into agriculture-friendly nations, few countries can beat Nigeria. Why is a country so endowed still dependent on imported food to feed the populace? Nigeria is peculiar in nature, it is the only country where all the problems are known, all the solutions and resources to be deployed to tackle the problems are available, but nothing is being done. That is the area where Nigeria presents what is called global dilemma.
Source: Daily Independent
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