Nigerians pay dearly for living in a country that has some of the worst cities for humans to live in the world.
They pay for the lack of infrastructure through the number of hours spent in traffic jams and for the health challenges resulting from a chaotic environment, poor planning and a total lack of facilities.
The stress of dealing with the myriad of challenges above brings the country’s life expectancy rate to one of the lowest in the world. For the many low-income earners in the country, meeting the basic needs of life is almost like passing though the proverbial eye of a needle.
Lagos State, for example, was ranked the sixth-cheapest city in the world to live in, but the Economist Intelligence Unit said the business hub of Nigeria is also among the world’s cities that have faced political, security and infrastructural challenges, and as such there is some correlation between the cost of living ranking and its sister ranking, the liveability survey.
“Put simply, cheaper cities also tend to be less liveable,” the Economist Intelligence Unit writes.
According to the 2018 Global Liveability Index by The Economist Intelligence Unit in collaboration with the World Bank, Lagos occupied the 138th position out of the 140 cities considered for the ranking.
This made it the third-worst city for humans to live in the world, outperforming only Dhaka in Bangladesh and Damascus in war-torn Syria.
Take a typical scenario, Adeyemi Abimbola is a 42-year-old single mother who resides in Ikorodu, a city located in the north-east of Lagos State, but works as a Customer Service Representative in a super market at the high-end residential district of Lekki.
Due to her low income of N50,000 ($138) per month, she has been unable to secure a rental accommodation on the Island. The price of a single room in the neighborhood goes for N1 million and above.
The lady is now looking much older than her age, owing to the stress from the long hours of travel to work and even worse for her, now that her husband is late she has also had to add taking her children to school.
The lack of a well-structured transport system in the city is the reason why Abimbola has to set out on time to drop her kids to school to ensure they don’t arrive school late daily.
The hardworking lady travels a total of 4 to 5 hours every day, and the many days she is unlucky especially in the wet season, the time of her trip within Lagos can be substantially more especially on rainy days.
Narrating her frustration, she confirms that “I sleep on the bus almost every day, and I wish my community was well planned, at least the closest primary school to my house wouldn’t be up to an hour’s drive and the stress of taking my children to school would have been lifted off me,”
While other countries around the world are making great strides in building liveable and affordable cities, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, remains a baby who is still learning to crawl and is constantly trying to play catch up.
The high cost of living in the country, coupled with the lack of infrastructure, improper town planning and poor healthcare system, make Nigeria uncompetitive among its peers.
The World Economic Forum (WEF)’s 2016-17 global competitiveness index ranked Nigeria’s infrastructure low (132 out of 138 countries), and according to its 2016 Executive Opinion Survey, the poor supply of infrastructure is one of the biggest constraints of doing business in the country.
According to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the country needs about $3 trillion in the next 26 years to bridge the infrastructure gap and the projection by the United Nations that Nigeria will be the third-most populous nation in the world by the year 2050 will surely put more pressure on the country and its resources.
Poor construction, bad maintenance, corruption and a perceived lack of investor security deter many potential investors from coming into the country and so the government depends largely on borrowing to fund its budget deficit.
According to the 2018 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, some of the worst roads in Africa are found in Nigeria.
The international non-profit organisation ranked over 140 countries based on the quality (extensiveness and condition) of their road infrastructure. The survey saw Africa’s most populous nation occupying the bottom of the region’s pyramid alongside its neighbour, Cameroon, who ranked 126 globally and scored 2.6 out of 7.
Nigeria followed in line as it ranked 127 in the world with a score of 2.5.
This was despite Namibia’s record in the review period, as the South West African country beat China and India with a rank of 31 out of 137 countries (with a score of 5.0 out of 7), leaving global economic giants like China and India to rank 42 and 55, respectively.
South Africa was also able to make it as the last African country to be in the top 50 list. It ranked 50 globally and sixth across the continent with a score of 4.4.
There are many consequences of a poor road network in Nigeria, the most grievous being the danger it poses to human lives. In July 2017 alone, 13 people on the average died from vehicle accidents each day, with over 1,200 vehicles involved in mishaps during the month.
Meanwhile, Nigeria suffers from a continual mass exodus of nurses, doctors and other health practitioners who leave the country in search of better opportunities outside of Nigeria.
This phenomenon, known as the health “Brain Drain,” is devastating Nigerians’ wellbeing on multiple levels. Each trained medical professional represents an investment by the government, which then suffers a great loss when that individual chooses to leave the country. Infant mortality is also an issue, with about 20 percent of children dying before the age of 5.
According to International Real Estate Federation (FIABCI), affordable housing, efficient transportation and respect for the environment, are essential for a vibrant city.
Studies indicate that there is a dire need to renew focus on affordable/workforce housing as it is urgent and absolutely necessary.
Thus, the Nigerian government, the country’s town planners and property developers must come together and offer sincere and prompt interventions to alleviate the situation to ensure there is a reform in the way cities are planned, financed, developed, governed and managed.
Surveys indicate that despite the presence of numerous real estate developers in Nigeria and Lagos especially, the more than 17 million housing deficit has not been bridged owing to the lack of tailored housing products for the lower segment of the economy.
Despite accounting for the larger population of the country, the low income earners are not the target market for developers, either for those developing to lease or to sell.
This is because the double-digit interest rate at which the developers access credit, coupled with the cost of constructing a property which ranges between N8m to N20 million for a typical house for middle class or lower-income people, is high. So in order to get back their investment in the shortest of time, property developers exclude the lower segment of the economy from the market due to their dampened purchasing power.
Some of the challenges dragging the real estate sector include: land ownership and acquisition, which is often lengthy, cumbersome and urgently needs a review as well as tightening to mitigate fraud.
There is equally the challenge of poor infrastructure. Cost of providing infrastructure has remained high; and in many parts of the country infrastructure is lacking, but it is clear that if it can be provided it would stimulate growth.
Others, according to experts, include inroads to provide affordable housing for the middle-low end of the market, which is very enormous; hence the real estate sector requires some legislative changes or some sort of government intervention, which is not unusual.
According to the figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s real estate sector as at Q4 2018 contracted by 3.85 percent (year-on-year). This is 2.07 percentage points better than the -5.92 percent growth rate for the year end at Q4 2017.
The property industry was also less attractive for bank lending. In the last quarter of 2018, the sector was only allocated credit of N622 billion, representing a 12.30 percent decline from the N710 billion it got in Q3 2018.
The credit share that the real estate sector got from the country’s commercial bank in the review quarter represents 4.12 percent of the total N15.13 trillion credits to the entire private sector for that period.
Industry sources say that less attention is being directed at the sector. When one provides an individual with accommodation or has made affordable accommodation easier to access, you have removed about 80 percent of their burden and so there is need to focus on the sector like is being done for agriculture and this can be dealt with by fixing services and infrastructure that will make our cities affordable to live in.
It is clear that when cities become too expensive to live in people become fatigued as they are constantly on the wheel, trying to make ends meet, to provide school fees, pay medical bills, etc.
According to the Seventh World Happiness Report by the United Nations, Nigeria’s ranking improved from its 91st position in 2018 to 85 out of 156 countries in 2019.
Despite its progress, Africa’s largest oil-producing country lagged when compared to Malaysia’s 80th position. In the same period, Libya and Pakistan ranked better than Nigeria at 72 and 56 respectively.
The report ranks countries on six key variables that support wellbeing: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity.
As such, affordable cities must be planned such that it is convenient as much as possible so that schools are near homes, transportation is available, basic infrastructure and services are not only available and accessible but also affordable to make it attractive for citizens to buy in.
Affordable cities are not only affordable in terms of cost of facilities but also the fact that quality of life is reasonably cheap to the city inhabitant. A poorly planned city leads to poor infrastructure, plenty of traffic, citizens who seat in traffic all day, inhaling exhaust fumes, leading to avoidable illnesses and huge medical bills. A poorly planned city lowers the quality of family life, leading to recalcitrance amongst children where proper parental upbringing is lacking and many societal problems in the long run.
A poorly planned city lowers productivity and in the final analysis the Gross Domestic Product of any nation. A poorly planned city is a nightmare for security and negatively affects internal and external investments. A poorly planned city is basically expensive and this expense is borne by the inhabitants.
Studies have shown that affordable cities make happy people, happy people make good citizens. Good citizens on the other hand take ownership of their environment.
Nigerians deserve to live in cities that are affordable and the earlier the governments at the various levels understand
CHUDI S. UBOSI (fnivs)
Ubosi is an estate surveyor and valuer and a partner at Ubosi Eleh & Co and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV).
