CHUKA UROKO
Worsening economic situation in Nigeria, which is making it almost impossible for many citizens to own their own homes and in some cases, unable to rent decent accommodation calls for retooling of the National Housing Policy to make it more responsive to people’s needs, writes CHUKA UROKO
The idea that created the National Housing Policy 18years ago planned it as a composite and working instrument for ensuring that every Nigerian owned or had access to a decent, safe and healthy housing accommodation at an affordable cost. The policy encompasses issues of housing finance, building and construction materials, low cost housing and re-organisation of mortgage.
Virtually all these issues raised in the policy are individually and collectively affecting home access and housing delivery in the country. Housing finance particularly is a big issue considering the level of poverty in the country and the fledgling nature of our mortgage industry.
The mortgage industry is still at infancy even as some analysts believe that it is non-existent while others say whatever it is we have as mortgage are commercial loans where interest rates are charged in double digits, thus making it accessible only to the rich who don’t even need it.
The issue of building and construction materials is critical. This is a country where over 80 percent of raw materials needs are imported. Local alternatives are either non-existent or untapped and undeveloped where available.
Low cost housing as envisioned in the policy would have made housing quite accessible to the poor and this would have been possible through government intervention by developing social housing or through legislation that would make housing fund cheap and accessible to all who need it.
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There is no gainsaying that the non-implementation of this policy almost two decades after even upon the waste of tax-payer’s money in setting up committees to Constructionthat effect, accounts for the state of housing in the country today.
Government followed the launching of the policy with the establishment of the National Housing Fund (NHF) in 1992, the creation of a legal framework for the Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs) and a two-tier mortgage structure comprising the PMIs as retail mortgage operators and the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria as a wholesale lender, regulator and secondary mortgage operator.
In spite of the review of the policy in 2002 based on government’s white paper on the recommendations of the Peter Odili Committee on NHF in 2000 and M. Yahaya Committee on the merger of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) and the Federal Mortgage Finance Limited (FMFL) in 2001, followed by the Akin Mabogunje Presidential Technical Committee set up to implement the recommendations, Nigeria presently has a housing deficit overhang of over 16 million units.
Experts say the current situation is not due to lack of knowledge of what should be done, but instead, lack of the political will on the part of successive governments in the country to implement the provisions of the NHP which, in their opinion, is explicit and exhaustive enough on all that needs to be done to house Nigerians properly and adequately.
According to some of them, the present housing difficulty in Nigeria arises not necessarily because of poverty, but because of the absence of an effective administrative machinery to mobilize and organise the country’s natural, human and industrial resources, for housing and urban development.
Mohammed Jimoh Faworaja, an architect and president of Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN) told Business Day that Nigeria’s huge housing deficit is as a result of the country not being able to articulate the best strategies for housing Nigerians, lamenting the non-implementation, almost two decades after, of the housing policy that came up to specify areas that needed to be addressed for us to be able to ensure that Nigerians were properly housed.
“If you look closely at the policy, you see that the issue of housing finance came in; the issue of materials; low cost housing was even compartmentalized for it to be addressed specially, and you also have the issue of re-organisation of mortgage. How much of these issues have been treated in such a way that we can categorically say that they have been addressed?” he queried.
While Faworaja says we need to revisit the 1991 NHP with a view to implementing it and ensuring that more Nigerians have access to their own homes, Fortune Ebie, former chairman of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) suggests that the Land Use Act of 1978 should be amended, reviewed or possibly expunged from the 1999 constitution as a way forward for increased homeownership.
Faworaja laments further that after so long, virtually nothing has been done to address the issues raised in the policy. ‘If you look at that policy, you see that we are not yet there in virtually all these issues. About 12 years after the policy was formulated, we tried to review it, and eight years down the line, we are yet to focus on that review.
Until we go back and get the structure right, we will continue to have this housing problem”, he said, adding that the country has a huge housing deficit because “we have failed to take some far-reaching decisions on the production of building materials. We have not taken the decision to do that 20 years after the first indication that there is need to address that issue”.
According to the APBN president, who is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Architects, virtually every state in the country has one form of raw material or another, including granite, marble and limestone for cement deposits, which can be manipulated and turned into anything we want comparable to others from any other part of the world.
On the strength of this, he advocates materials policy as a way of reducing the cost of accessing homes in the country. “Houses are very expensive in the country because materials are expensive and again because there is no functional and efficient mortgage system to give housing loan to needy Nigerians”, he explained.
This is a county where house prices, no matter how small, are completely out of the reach of the ordinary citizen. Whether it is to build or to buy, a 2-bedroom bungalow, depending on the location, is well over N8 million. It is a different story altogether if one is buying from any of the highbrow areas of Ikoyi, Victoria Island or Lekki where a wing of duplex goes for between N100 million and N200 million.
The renowned architect disclosed that the Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIA) had made series of recommendations to the government on the issue of building and construction, recalling that about five years ago, the body raised the issue of materials policy for the country which, he explained, is about harnessing all the materials that are available in the country while the implementation is about getting all the stakeholders involved which is where the professionals come in.
He advised that the earlier government started taking the issue of materials policy seriously, the better for the nation and the closer we shall get to address the housing problem.
“Agreed that we have mega plants for cement, but there is no reason why we should not have cottage industries for the commodity in some states of the federation”, he said, stressing that transportation contributes significantly to the high cost of cement.
Ebie sees the Land Use Act as the worst enemy of mortgage institution, stressing that “until that act is removed from the constitution, reviewed and rewritten, there is scarcely any transaction in the built environment that will have meaning”.
He notes that the Act which rests ownership and the power to allot and revoke land on the state governors has made land acquisition for housing development a nightmare.
In the major cities of the country, land values even with the present economic meltdown are very high and in a place like Lagos and Abuja, land charges by government are prohibitive.
Interestingly however, in pursuit of land reform, which is part of its Seven-Point Agenda, the Yar’Adua administration has forwarded the Land Use Act to the National Assembly for review and amendment.
The land reform is expected to allow ability to transfer security interest easily and at low cost; facilitate registration and enforcement of liens, and to protect investors against bankruptcy.
Ebie wants the National Assembly to expedite action on the review and/or amendment of the Act along with nine other laws including foreclosures and securitization laws.
For as long as this act remains part of our constitution, for so long will land remain a big issue in housing delivery. This is because some states, especially Lagos, that sees land as a major source of their internally generated revenue, imposes outrageous charges on property developers and delays building plans approvals for periods that are economically unrealistic. The cost of all these are transferred to property prices, thus making them pretty unaffordable to average Nigerians.
