As concerns continue to mount over the widening housing demand-supply gap in Nigeria, governments at various levels in the country have been charged to adopt urban renewal and public private partnership (PPP) as policies that could aid holistic housing delivery.
Akinade Tijani, keynote speaker at the 2019 Mandatory Continuous Professional Development (MCPD) programme of the Lagos State branch of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), gave this charge.
Tijani explained that because of paucity of funds and scarcity of other resources, government should adopt PPP scheme within the sector, saying that government needed other forms of funding and financing to continue to provide services to the people.
He stated that if taken as land development for the purpose of social, economic and environmental enhancement, urban renewal should attract private investment because land development has always been a profitable venture.
In a paper titled, ‘Unlocking the Investment Potentials in Urban Regeneration: The Public Private Partnership Experience’, Tijani said government must accept that it has to make the appropriate investments to attract private funds to urban renewal.
According to him, “urban renewal cannot be 100 per cent funded and financed by the private sector. Lagos State can consider an Urban Renewal Fund to take itself out of being classified as a city of 70 per cent slum.”
Adedotun Bamigbola, the chairman of NIESV Lagos branch, said there was a need for collaboration in the built environment to better drive a genuine cause for urban renewal in the country and reduce the challenges faced by private developers and investors in supporting government in housing delivery and infrastructure improvement.
“You have to look at how it will be beneficial on both sides – government wants to generate revenue; at the same time the private sector can only take opportunity where they will also benefit. So, even if the opportunities present themselves, there must be economic gains to the investors before they put their money into it,” said Bamigbola.
According to him, there is a need for government to give tax holiday to players in the real estate sector for growth. He opined that spreading the tax burden and reducing demands on real estate investors from take-up will help private investors partner with government in various developmental projects.
Moses Ogunleye, the MD, MOA Planners Limited and chairman of the occasion, said cities and urban areas were supposed to be engines of growth, hence the need to always think on how to improve the standard of living in urban areas. According to him, there will always be a need for urban regeneration because cities are like human beings.
Ogunleye said that urban renewal and regeneration dealt on how Nigeria should build its infrastructure and other buildings of historical and architectural values.
“The potentials are huge, which is why government is calling for PPP and government alone cannot do it; when you don’t continue a planned urban renewal and implement it appropriately, it will not become renewal; if you just do a road – you have just developed a road,” he said.
He said that urban renewal was bigger than just constructing a road; “you are transforming an entire economy, social life; and if you do not bring the people who are directly involved in, you will not achieve much,” he said.
