It has often been said, and with good reasons, that maintenance culture is not one of Nigeria’s virtues. This is a country where a government spends huge amount of public funds to do projects, rolls out the drums to commission these projects, puts them to use for a while, then abandons them for whatever reasons and moves on pretending that these structures never existed.
The entire Nigerian landscape is today littered with such abandoned Federal Government properties running into billions of naira. Many of them now pose security threats as they have been taken over by various descriptions of hoodlums and miscreants.
Lagos State, perhaps, by virtue of its being the former capital of the country, has a fair share of these abandoned monuments. The most prominent among these is probably, the old Federal Secretariat Building in Ikoyi, the city’s most prime location. Before its abandonment decades ago, the secretariat provided office space for federal civil servants and served as a powerhouse for deliberation on and implementation of policies that concerned the development of the country. It, however, became ‘fallow’ after the federal capital moved to Abuja in 1976.
In 2015, an independent estate surveyor and valuer estimated the value of the Federal Secretariat Ikoyi at N40 billion. Sadly, the secretariat is just a small scene in a voluminous drama of government neglect.
In Lagos alone, we can count on our fingertips the 45,000-capacity National Stadium in Surulere, the Nigerian External Telecommunications (NET) building on Marina, the Independence Building on old Defence Street, the Tafawa Balewa Square, the Mosaic House on Tinubu Street, the National Theatre at Iganmu, among several others. The neglect and abandonment of these national monuments, no doubt, have put a huge question mark on the funds spent to erect them.
In a recent article, Tayo Ogunbiyi of the Features Unit of the Lagos State Ministry of Information and Strategy, says of the National Stadium, which hosted the 1973 All Africa Games, “Today, the once dazzling ‘Sports City’ is in a mess as it is now home to street urchins, the destitute, sex hawkers, drug peddlers and addicts and gamblers. To fully underscore its dwindling fortune, the stadium last hosted a major sporting event in 2004.”
Beyond these major eye-catching ones, many older Nigerians would recall the Low Cost Housing scheme developed by the President Shehu Shagari administration in the late 1970s to early 1980s, which had a fair spread across the country. Most of those low-cost estates are today lying waste, perhaps only occupied by rodents and wild animals. Of course, wrong location was one of the numerous challenges that marred that beautiful dream by the Shagari government. A trip from Ninth Mile Corner to Nsukka in Enugu State, for instance, will reveal some of the Shagari buildings wasting away in the thick forest, uninhabited by humans, even as Nigeria suffers a deficit of 17 million housing units.
Not a few Nigerians would also recall that during his failed transition programme, the then self-styled Military President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida erected two massive structures in each of the 774 local government areas of the country to serve as party secretariats for the two political parties at the time, National Republican Convention and Social Democratic Party. That amounts to 1,548 buildings.
Today, our enquiries show that those structures for the most part are not in use, while in some local government areas they have been converted to magistrate courts or put to other uses.
The Afuze Games Village example
The Afuze Olympic Games Village in Owan East Local Government Area of Edo State may well tell the story better. Built in 1974 by the then military governor of Midwestern State, Brigadier-General Samuel Ogbemudia, and opened by General Yakubu Gowon, the games village sits on a surveyed land measuring 146,998 hectares, along with the Afuze College of Physical and Health Education. It has small housing units and was originally meant to harbour, train and prepare the state’s athletes for the National Sports Festival that began in 1973. The athletes were meant to train with the top-class facilities in the College of Physical and Health Education.
In the late 1980s, however, the Federal Government was said to have taken over the place to train national athletes ahead of global competitions.
Today, sadly, this monument, which has been abandoned for many decades, has become a ghost village harbouring mostly reptiles and rodents. The only “saving grace” seems to be the fact that the locals, in order to keep the place going, repaired some of the decrepit buildings and converted them into low-cost residential apartments.
In February 2016, a national newspaper published an elaborate report on the games village with a damning verdict.
“The world-class boxing gym, which once had a roof suspended by strong wooden pillars, was now non-existent. What was left was a gym overgrown with weeds with the pillars burnt, an act perpetrated by hunters in search of animals. Other facilities like the handball pitch, basketball court, volleyball court, tennis courts, hockey and cricket pitches, located inside the Michael Imoudu College of Physical Education, were also decaying,” the report said.
“The multi-purpose Conference Hall of the games village has partly been overgrown by grass. A stale stench of excreta, which is littered everywhere inside the building, greets you as you enter the building. The ceilings have fallen off with all the windows vandalised… The Human Performance Laboratory, which used to offer a variety of fitness services such as personal training, massage therapy, fitness testing and evaluations of athletes, is now non-existent. The HPL helped coaches identify the fitness needs of their athletes and provided them with an individualised exercise prescription,” it said.
In April last year, Solomon Dalung, minister of Youth and Sports, while commenting on the state of country’s sports facilities, admitted that the Games Village was worse than the local shrine in his village in Plateau State.
He, however, promised that the facility and others in the country would be brought back to life. Nearly a year later, that has not happened, even as the Federal Government dilly-dallies on the proposed takeover of the National Stadium by Lagos State.
The Federal Secretariat – the story behind the story
Following the monetisation policy of the Federal Government under President Olusegun Obasanjo, the Federal Secretariat was sold out alongside other government properties in Lagos offloaded into the property market between 2003 and 2006. It was acquired by Wale Babalakin’s Resort International Limited.
The company bought the facility with the intention of redeveloping it into residential properties, but the redevelopment effort which would have provided homes for a good number of families was stalled by the Lagos State government which, among other things, demanded that Resort International must obtain a fresh Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) from the state government, irrespective of documents issued by the Federal Government on the property. The company was also required to apply for the consent of the Lagos governor on the property; apply for a change of use as well as a development permit from the state government.
Resort International considered the demand by the Lagos State government inconsistent with the Development Lease Agreement (DLA) which it had entered into with the Federal Government in 2006 which granted it 99 years’ lease to redevelop the secretariat complex into 48 luxury apartments.
It, therefore, took the Federal Government to an Arbitration Tribunal where it claimed that it had suffered damages totalling N88 billion as a result of the breach of a clause of the DLA by the government.
In an award in its favour a couple of years ago, the tribunal, chaired by Fred Adeniyi Coker, an architect, supported by a legal practitioner, Yusuf Alli, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), and former Attorney General of the Federation, Abdullahi Ibrahim, ordered FG to pay N54 billion in damages to the company and declared that FG had failed in its obligations to the company under the DLA.
The N54 billion awarded to Resort International comprised N12 billion as Direct Expenditure with interest at 17.26 percent from September 2008; N9 billion as Loss of Expected Income with interest at 17.26 percent from September 2008, and N5 billion as Special Damages.
The tribunal averred that the totality of the awards meant that as at January 2016, the Federal Government owed Resort International the sum of N54 billion which continues to accumulate interest at 17.26 percent per annum, and confirmed Resort’s title to the Federal Secretariat property.
Though close watchers of events around the secretariat complex reason that FG was hamstrung by the Lagos State government, which once showed interest in acquiring the complex for certain vested interests, trouble was in store by the time the complex was formally handed over to Resort International.
What experts say
Whatever be the case, the major concern for industry watchers is that this monument is wasting away when there are alternative uses to which it could profitably be put into.
“That asset is standing on prime land. Don’t forget that it is in Ikoyi which is one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, location in Nigeria,” says an estate surveyor and valuer who does not want to be named.
“I am still in doubt if it is really the Lagos State government that is holding down the redevelopment of that facility into residential apartments to provide homes for the residents of the state,” Johnson Chukwuma, a structural engineer, says.
“With a housing deficit estimated at 3 million units and avowed determination to provide housing for the residents through partnership with the private sector, Lagos State should be encouraging the redevelopment of the facility and not stalling it,” he adds.
Maryanne Udo Okonjo, a lawyer, real estate developer and chief executive officer, Fine and Country West Africa, is at a loss as to why the Federal Secretariat and other national monuments are not being transformed into other uses as is done in other countries of the world. Though she says that abandoned monuments are not peculiar to Nigeria, she argues, however, that what happens in other countries is different.
She cites the St Pancreas Renaissance Hotel in the UK, a hotel facility that was abandoned for 69 years before it was transformed in 2011 into a 5-Star hotel, just like the Liverpool’s Grade 11 listed Gladstone Conservatory, also in the UK, which was abandoned for over 100 years after its use as Leisure Place, but was transformed, in 2007, into a venue for wedding and football hospitality events.
“It would be an advantage to Nigerians if the custodians of the old Federal Secretariat look inwards and proffer creative ways the building can be transformed either for commercial or residential purposes,” Okonjo says.
“It can be used for mixed use developments or work, live and play. It can also be used as a co-work space, multi-studio apartments. Alternatively, it can be used as retail space in order to reduce the 2.7 million space deficit across the nation,” she adds.
Before now, it was argued that the reason for the lingering stand-off between the federal and Lagos State government over that property was because they belonged to different parties. But that is no longer the case. Both now belong to the same political party that promised to deliver one million housing units to Nigerians every year.
Calculating the opportunity cost
Conservatively, Nigeria has a deficit of 17 million housing units that requires building 720,000 housing units every year for the next 20 years to bridge. Lagos alone has 3 million units of this deficit that requires building about 200,000 housing units every year for the next 20 years to bridge.
The Federal Secretariat redevelopment, going by Resort International’s plans, would have delivered about 50 residential apartments which would have provided home for at least 300 residents of the state, assuming each of the 50 families that would have occupied the apartments had six members.
“There is every opportunity now for all the parties to the transaction on the facility to come together with a view to resolving their differences, more so now that the Federal Government and Lagos State are under one party. I want to believe that this is the finest moment to get this issue resolved and allow Resort International to provide homes for Lagosians as intended,” says Debo Ajani, an estate manager.
