My-Ace China, known as the “Mayor of Housing,” is a prominent Nigerian real estate entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist based in Port Harcourt. Rivers State. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of The Mayor of Housing Limited. He is known for driving innovation in property development and promoting housing accessibility. In this interview with ZEBULON AGOMUO and CHUKA UROKO, he spoke passionately about the ongoing Alesa Highlands Development Green Smart City project in Port Harcourt, saying that it is the Banana Island of the Garden City. Excerpts:
Institutional lenders increasingly assess governance and community risk before committing capital. Your Alesa Highlands project allocates equity participation to indigenous landowners. How does that model shape investor confidence and project sustainability? First, what is the meaning of Alesa and what brought about the choice of the name?
Okay, beautiful question. Nothing excites me like talking about Alesa because they call it the new Banana Island. We call it the wonder of Port Harcourt, but it is Alesa Highland’s Sustainable Green Smart City, the first sustainable green smart city and zero emissions smart city, green city in Nigeria and the lowest density development in the Niger Delta. And the name Alesa is the name of the host community of our project. It was Confucius that said hundreds of years ago that “tell me and I will forget. Show me and I might remember. Involve me and I will be committed.” Commitment of host community is what determines the thin line between community hostility and community hospitality. Sustainability says that you can build a castle in the air. The land on which you are building is the host community. The problem with models before now is that you intend to go and build heaven in the middle of hell and you don’t make peace with hell and people have to go through hell to get to heaven. You’ve created a heaven but is surrounded by hell. So, the best thing is, if you can make the surrounding as good as heaven, make it at least as good as Purgatory, because anybody in Purgatory has hope of getting to heaven. The hospitality of the host community becomes your biggest asset. Non-monetary assets and capital have confused investors and implementors for years that they underrate the strength of non-monetary, non-monetisable and insidious cost capital. They are capital that their cost is neither pounds nor dollars.
Their costs are more hidden and they are more intrinsic but will I call it more lethal and because they come gradually, slowly- you are dying slowly but you don’t know; it’s like cancer. So, what we now did is we wanted to build an environment because it was Dr. David McClelland of Harvard that said your environment determines 95percent of your success. We wanted to build an environment that is a diaspora in our locality. So, we now had to get a name, a meaning for that name because naming rights gives people joy. The Igbo people have an adage that if you want a young man to fend for a goat, allow him to name the goat and call it his goat. He will fend for that goat until the day the goat is killed, he will now find out it’s not his goat.
So, we named the estate Alesa Highlands Sustainable Estate so that the community has that pride of immortalisation of their community’s name. Lagos does that a lot with a code this, a code that. So, when we did that we were now forced to get a meaning for Alesa for our off takers and partners and after digging deep into the only asset more valuable than real estate which is the brain, and at the Mayor of Housing we pride ourselves with working with both assets; we were able to come out with a meaning that means Alesa is an acronym for an Advanced Living Environment for Sustainable Advantage and our tagline for Alesa is live higher for those that want to live higher than the sub-mundane and stressful living, and then we allocated 10percent equity ownership based on Confucius that says “involve me and I’ll be committed.” In our expenditure, allocation is different from profit share; profit share says the year you make profit you give me 10percent; expenditure allocation says as you are spending money like budgetary allocation you allocate 10percent of your budget to the CSR to the original owners and we started even while we were still acquiring the land; we were able to launch Alesa Youth Security Outfit and we donated some security equipment to them in 2023; we were able to sponsor the hitherto defunct Alesa Unity Cup Football that brought alive something that was dead in the past 12 years and united the community. We were able to fund the Alesa carnival and all this came from that 10percent allocation.
We’re going to have the Alesa skill acquisition centre; we’re going to have a mini health centre and we have other things- not only are we allocating 10percent, we’re also opening up that fund to third party contributions through Alesa Highlands Foundation so that if we’re working for instance, with global funds in Canada for the funding of the project, they too might like what we’re doing and throw their own percentage contribution into that Foundation; the Foundation is strictly run by the aboriginal land owners and then we’re building the biggest mall in Nigeria in Alesa Highlands and we have a unique village market. The village market and those aboriginal land owners will have free shop spaces in our mall to sell the same pepper, tomatoes sold in the village, but now in the mall, for the same price but without the dirt, the “potopoto” and the flies of the village market, and that free mall we’re regulating their pricing by giving them access to free shops in the mall- any day you sell more than the approved price, you lose your free rent. So, all these have not only made the community buy into Alesa Highlands project but they are now owning it. We only gave them 10percent, equity but they are taking 110percent psychological, emotional and energy ownership of the project. When one of our foreign partners came for an inspection, he went there and because of the show the community made of this project, he asked me “you told me you bought land; you didn’t tell me you bought a community.” Nigerians are not hostile; money can buy you land in Nigeria but goodwill will buy you the community.
In addition to the benefits the community enjoy, are there some plans for maybe, scholarship, for their children or are there also some provisions for indigenes to have some accommodation in the estate?
Our model is 10 percent because the project scale is about 3000 plots, the initial is 1500 plus for Alesa Highlands, the Phase 2 is another 1500. All that will be generated will be that 10percent. For instance, 10percent of the revenue from the mall will be going to that place so that at the end of the year, because the fund is going to be administered through a Alesa Foundation, we have an oversight function, they have a board of trustees chairman already that handles that; it all depends on how good the 10percent pot is in a year that determines what we will do; for instance, the low hanging fruit for us which we are doing this year is security; after security, we are doing a skills acquisition because it is skilled people that can fend for themselves. We have a charity model that says giving people money is not charity because it is killing the people because the Chinese will say “give me a fish you feed me for a day, teach me how to fish, you feed me for life.” So, we are trying to use the skills acquisition and other empowerments to teach the people how to fish. So, our charity is not just throwing direct funds at the people, our charity system is to make sure that they are empowered to sustain the seed capital or whatever investment we make. So, there are lots of plans for training; lots of plans for empowerment; for skills acquisition even the artisan labour we will be using are there so we don’t have anything free for them; we don’t do direct CSR where you throw money into the community and cause them to start fighting themselves; we do structured CSR that is meant to empower not spoil. So, for us, we have a quotation that says “if you give a man money, you spoil the man; if you teach a man how to make money, you spur the man.” So, our model is to spur them into productivity because we have a 6P formula that says ‘peace precedes productivity; productivity precipitates into profitability. Profitability now starts the circle again, because nothing brings peace like profitability but it must start with peace; after peace it will precipitate into productivity, the productivity must have profitability; then when you are profitable you now know that Nigerians are happy people; when they make profit they don’t have time to make trouble; So, that’s the model we are running and so far we’ve been acquiring the property and we’ve been scaling this, it’s been amazing, we’ve not even gone far, but so far it’s been a model that the world needs to come and study.
You talked so much about this particular project; that means you are very passionate about it; my first question is who are your target markets in that project; two, having spoken also passionately about using clay (using local materials); what’s the percentage of local materials in that project that makes it perhaps, relatively more affordable than the ones built with imported materials?
The word build, operate and transfer, for me, I simplify it into indigenisation of global best practices. Whatever is working somewhere, I call it the copy and paste principle because we’re in the copy and paste era. But in pasting, you don’t just copy, you modify and paste. So, when you copy something that has a Mr. A, you should be able to, at least, change it to Mr. B so that it will be my copy because we’ve heard of very funny stories where people copy in exam and then they copy everything including the person’s name. So many of the failed projects in Africa, we copy, plus the white people’s name. So, we were able, as I told you, it’s a zero emissions estate because the world is global. God made it that man has a limit to our intelligence. There’s no straight line to the sky. It is a curved line. There’s a place you get to; you begin to come down.
Your intelligence begins to become foolishness. So, the word industrialisation became so technologically advanced that it became foolishness and now found out that nature was wiser than technology. And that’s why you notice that in energy now, we now discover that our energy was causing pollution and the nature is now going back.
The world is going back to green energy. What do we use for energy that does not disrupt nature? Because we now notice nature is wiser than man. Food, processed food became the rave of the sixties and seventies. When the check, eating processed food started coming in the nineties and 2000, cancers and degenerative disease became noticeable; the world is now going back to green, organic food. So, that’s what we are doing in housing. We are going back to green and then we have a green wall building system that delivers the partners that are coming in from Italy and Holland to do that for us, promised a 50percent reduction in the cost of our building.
But because I have not tested it, I promised my market a 20percent reduction. It will eliminate blocks and use sandstone, wire gauze and polystyrene to produce walls that are thinner, cheaper, more soundproof and more bulletproof. So, we are now not importing those walls.
We’re establishing that manufacturing plant in the estate that manufactures the wall. Because the way the model works is that when the architectural drawing is ready, they feed the machine with the dimension of the walls, it produces the walls, you go and assemble. So, our normal building that takes three weeks through that green wall system, I mean our normal building that takes four months to eight months, through that building, green wall system takes three weeks. Green wall is the name of the model. Yes, green walls. In three weeks, you have a stronger house, a more durable house, a zero emissions house and a cheaper house. So, we’ve been able to do that to make it cheaper.
And then we are the first estate in Africa that is going to deliver power at about 50percent the price of the grid, even less. So, if NEPA is charging 100 Naira per kilowatt, we’re going to charge N50 because we’re using an organic power generation that the stock feed is water. Even though the plant is quite expensive to procure initially, it has a long period of warranty. So, it allows us a long time to recoup our investment. So, that power is now going to use to power the small factory that will produce the green walls, reducing the cost of power in Nigeria, makes manufacturing or anything you want to do almost 50percent cheaper. And then Alesa Highlands is going to be the first model.
The name is Alesa Highlands, sustainable, green, smart city. Every word there is deliberate and necessary. In terms of sustainability, we’re going to be the first estate in Nigeria that doesn’t charge monthly service charge because we have a sustainable model where when you buy the house, part of your money goes into our ecosystem; that the dividends from that ecosystem will be used to service your service charge. So, it’s sustainable. Green means that everything we’re using will be green. Apart from green canopy of plants, it will be the highest concentration of green plants to houses in Nigeria. And we’re doing a three-foot horticulture, integrated horticulture that is horticulture for food, horticulture for medicine, and horticulture for beauty. Each house will have any medicinal plant that thrives in Nigeria, like Dogonyaro, so, that it’s not everything you drink chemical called drug. Now, I wonder if you tell primary school students to bring hibiscus, where will they find it? So, that is why it is green. Then smart means we’re deploying automation systems that will make most of these things automated to the whims and caprices of technology, so that it is not a green ancient house like 1950. It is a green contemporary technologically-compliant development. And as you said, I’m so passionate about it that in the past four years, I’ve not done any other thing except this. And in the next three years until we cross the threshold of development, we can’t even scale it. Because the Igbo people have an adage, “you don’t put two legs in the water.” So, we must put one, establish this in Port Harcourt, be sure, before we start another step.
If you look at the Nigerian housing sector, it’s concentrated mainly in Lagos and Abuja. Port Harcourt is a third in quotation marks. Why do you decide with all you have not to go where there’s more demand than where you’re operating?
Beautiful. I started my housing foray in Abuja. As a matter of fact, the first estate we had was in Guzape, Abuja. But I discovered there’s a book called the Blue Ocean Strategy. The Blue Ocean Strategy says that the shallow waters and the hanging waters is where everybody fishes. So, when you go there, you scramble. But if you have a vessel that can take you deeper into the sea where there is no scrambling, the blue part of the sea, you dominate there. So, when we came into Lagos, there are over 10,000 real estate companies scrambling in Lagos. There are about 5,000 real estate companies or more scrambling in Abuja.
We entered Port Harcourt; there were only three developers. The rest are land peddlers. Those three developers are because the difficulty of doing business, of getting land title, was very high.
So, we now decided, not only to surmount that difficulty, but to also advocate to the state government that your place is policy-locked or documentation-locked. This difficulty we are going through, if you make it easy, more people will come in and you turn Port Harcourt to the investment destination of the world. So, we didn’t run away and say when you change it. We used ourselves as our experimental guinea pig to surmount the difficulties. Why? The story is told of two Americans that went to do IT in the old India. When they got there, everybody was walking barefooted. One of them said, wow, bad market, shoes will never sell here. The other one shouted, awesome market, this is hot market, cheap shoes will sell here. He went back and mass-produced cheap shoes. They were college students. He went to a factory and he became a billionaire from selling cheap shoes in India and that’s how India started wearing cheap plastic shoes. So, we entered Port Harcourt, other people ran away saying no market. We entered and said, oh, sole market, where I will be the only whale in this blue ocean than being a crayfish in the shallow waters. So, we started and that’s why we were able to get Alesa to buy into what we were doing. If Alesa had 20 of my type, they probably wouldn’t listen to me. But they had only one of my type.
Rivers State probably has only one of my type. And then we have a guiding policy that says we don’t do business to participate. We do business to dominate. So, we saw a perfectly green, untouched, locked, green land we could exploit and unveil. Right now, it’s as if we are selling Port Harcourt to the world because it’s as if it’s a discovery because we’ve now unearthed that.
On real estate; what’s your short- and long-term expectation from your engagements with the youth?
Okay. I discovered something when I started selling real estate. Marketers in Nigeria are very anxious for quick gains. And even though many people, even the churches will tell you, you shouldn’t look for get-rich-quick schemes. But even many pastors want to get rich quick. Yes. So, patience, I prayed once to God about him answering my prayers on time. And he asked me in Galatians 5.22, where he wrote one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit as patience.
If he answers all my prayers when I want, will I go to the Bible and tear off that part of patience? And I’ll say no. So, I learned patience through real estate. And what made me learn patience was the juxtaposition of patience with gestational incubation. Patience is multiplication when you add gestation to it. If a woman gives birth in three months and another woman gives birth in six months, there’s no how the three months baby will be as mature as the six months baby. And there’s no how both of them will be as mature as the nine months baby. So, because of that, I now used to stop talking to youths, stop marketing to youth, but I felt the youth were useless to me. Until one day the Holy Spirit told me you are poor. I said, how? He said, the other two words for poverty is instant gratification. All right, note that. The other two words for poverty is instant gratification. And the other two words for wealth is delayed gratification.
So, he now told me that the youth are the leaders of tomorrow. But our leaders have neglected them and we are paying heavily as a country. Do I want to toe the path of Nigeria? I said, no.
He said, not only are the youth the leaders of tomorrow, the youth are the customers of tomorrow. They are the billionaires of tomorrow. And the Igbo people said, the chickens said, I will never forget the man that plucked my feathers in the rainy season. And I said, what can I do for the youth? And I found out that teaching is more charity than giving. I also need you to note this down. Teaching is more charity than giving.
So, I now opened a channel called My-Ace China. I have two channels on YouTube. My-Ace TV is my business channel. I don’t train; I only showcase my business. My-Ace China is my personal contribution channel where I teach the youth how to make sustainable wealth. I want to inspire the youth that it’s possible to make money in Nigeria.
