It is a universal acknowledgement that shelters keep people from harm; give people a feeling of well-being and boost their will to live. Having a shelter is also a basic human necessity, in addition to food and water. In some areas, the need for shelter may take precedence the need for food and possibly even water. Without shelters, people become exhausted and often lose their will to live due to prolonged exposure to the elements. Having a shelter therefore generally improves a person’s quality of life. When considered as a home, a shelter is also where family members interact and where children are raised properly. Since shelters provide a sense of security, dwellers can better focus on the other aspects of their lives. Shelters also provide privacy and encourage independence from the community.
Nigeria is typical of the third underdeveloped world with regards to inadequacy of decent shelter for citizens. Nigeria, a richly endowed and blessed country with an estimated human population of 175 million is still plagued by rising housing deficit with a large chunk of its people taking refuge in shanties in different parts of the country. Year in, year out, successive administrations keep issuing promises on how it intended to address rising deficit housing without taking visible steps to attaining tangible results. This gory situation is however made worse by the absence of a clear-cut programme of action for the housing sector. According to the CIA World Factbook, the United Nations estimated Nigeria’s population at 154,729,000 in 2009, 162,471,000 in 2011 and 174,507,539 in July 2013. It is also said that the population grew by 57 million between 1990 and 2009 thus making Nigerians under the age of 14 more than half of the population. Yet by 2012, the Federal Government put the deficit at 17 million units. Even by the end of 2014, the same figure of 17 million was still being bandied, which would be attributed to inefficient data gathering.
Housing experts note that the housing deficit has continued to increase saying that the development indicates that the government’s housing policy is not working as expected. They noted that the deficit rose from “seven million housing units in 1991 to between 12 and 15 million units in 2008, while peaking at between 17 and 18 million units in 2012”. Arguing further, they stated that the “deficit would continue to rise until the financial authorities are able to bring down interest rates to a single-digit level, so as to enable low income earners access mortgage loans”.
The shocking angle to this development is that at a time millions of Nigerians have no access to anything close to decent accommodation, the number of completed, tastefully furnished and state-of-the art but unoccupied structures is steadily on the increase across major towns and cities in the country. Abuja, the nation’s seat of power tops the unenviable list of cities littered with completed but yet to be occupied residential apartments. Unoccupied houses have become common sight in highbrow areas of Abuja. A check into why some of the houses remained unoccupied at times decades after their completion had high cost of renting or leasing of such property as major reason.
In spite of numerous housing estates in various parts of the city, rents for a two-bedroom bungalow in Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse and Garki goes for between N2.5 million and N3 million per annum while for the same type of apartment in the satellite towns such as Kubwa, Lugbe and Karu, among others, tenants are required to pay between N800, 000 and N1.2 million per annum in private housing estates. This has compelled most residents of the FCT to seek shelter in neighbouring states.
Economic Confidential sought the views of some Abuja residents on this issue. While most of the respondents identified high cost of rent as the major reason why such houses remain unoccupied, a few cited greed and lack of contentment as other factors. While stressing the urgent need for the owners of these empty houses dotting the landscape of choice areas of Abuja to have a change of mind, these Nigerians are of the collective opinion that the system should put in place a mechanism that will check this astronomical rise in the number of unoccupied homes in Abuja.
Areas like Asokoro, Maitama, Wuse, Gwarimpa and new settlements like Apo, Gudu and Katampe are examples of settlements in Abuja with growing numbers of empty houses. Further check conducted by Economic Confidential revealed that some of the houses only have “gatemen occupying just the gatehouse, while rodents and cobwebs have completely taken over a large portion of most of them”. Our reporter also discovered some of the buildings have lasted more than five years.
Speaking to Economic Confidential, an estate developer, Godwin Idoko said, “most of those houses are owned by top ranking civil servants and politicians. Most of them have some of my colleagues fronting for them. You won’t be surprised to hear that some of these property owners have long forgotten that a few of their houses are left unoccupied”.
Stressing, he said, “The outrageous fees often charged by property owners is also a contributory factor. The fees are just too high to afford. I think government has a lot to check this development. Some of these houses are presently occupied by rodents and reptiles. They prefer to leave them unoccupied than to lease them out for fees below their target. They don’t just care about anyone”.
Possibly, the system, through its relevant departments in the housing sector should come up with workable legislation that will help in checking the excesses of property owners in the country. Apart from Lagos, there is hardly a state in Nigeria that has an existing housing policy that seeks to regulate the activities of landlords in the country.
Second Vice-President of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), Mr. Rowland Abonta advocated the imposition of special taxes on unoccupied buildings. He said such move will help to reduce the high cost of rents in the country. He lamented the high rate at which completed buildings had remained unoccupied in some parts of the country, especially in Abuja, owing to the high cost of rents and argued that the additional tax which would be imposed on such property after one year of being vacant would force the owners of such buildings to bring down the cost.
“There are quite a number of vacant houses in Abuja yet rent is high. The reason is that there is pressure from the low and middle income earners and a lot of people in that category can’t build their own houses because they depend on rented houses. So, many of these houses are built by very rich people who didn’t suffer so much for the money and so they can afford to lock up the houses when they build the houses and fix the prices and people don’t rent them. But there is a way out: government should start imposing taxes on such accommodation when these houses are built. They should be able to pay government such taxes and this could be used to put pressure on them to rent the houses.”
Also speaking on the ugly phenomenon, Mr Gimba Ya’u Kumo, the Managing Director, Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, said that something urgent must be done to bridge the housing deficit. “If nothing is done, there will be an estimated homeless population of 24.4 million people in Nigeria by 2015,’’ he stressed.
Also speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Nationwide Mass Housing Scheme for Nigerian Workers recently in Abuja, President Goodluck Jonathan reiterated his administration’s commitment to meet the housing needs of Nigerians. “From the onset, this administration was determined that the transformation of every sector of our national economy, would be at the top of our National Development Agenda. Within the matrix of national development, the potential of the Housing Sector to change lives and engender economic development was too critical to ignore, given the multiplier effects that the sector can engender in terms of job and wealth creation, and the maximization of human potentials for national development and growth”.
As brilliant as Mr President’s initiative for the housing sector is, it requires more action for it to come into fruition. Concerned government establishments in the housing sub-sector must rise to the challenge of ensuring that sanity is restored in the sector.
Bankers and anti-fraud agents attributed incidences of high unoccupied houses within the FCT to tight anti-money laundering measures by the Central bank of Nigeria as civil servants, top government officials, politicians and their associates now launder slush funds in the property market.
Chairman of the Senate Committee on FCT, Senator Smart Adeyemi also blamed the high property rent in Abuja on the activities of money launderers. He said these money launderers usually build houses with free money and are eager to recoup their funds with high rents. Adeyemi observed that property owners could afford to have their houses unoccupied in Abuja because no charges were imposed on the property. He lamented that most Abuja residents cannot afford accommodation within the city amidst many houses either because the owners are not ready to lease them to tenants or because of the exorbitant rents placed on them.
“There are so many empty houses in Abuja because they were built with free money. Some of these houses have been completed for more than two, three years; yet there are no tenants living in them. It is because some of them (houses) are used to launder money. Owners of these houses do not take loans; that is why prospective tenants have problems in securing accommodation in Abuja. Most of these landlords didn’t take any loans to build these houses. That is why they can afford to keep those houses lying fallow till thy kingdom comes. It makes no economic sense to build a house and keep it shut for two to three years. These houses were built with free money; that is why the owners are insisting on high rents,” he declared.
Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Senator Bala Mohammed said his administration was “doing so much to encourage the private sector to reduce the housing and infrastructural deficit in the FCT. The land swap is being done to see land as a resource to build 10 more districts. The FCT was conceptualised as a territory with 8,000sq/km, with a 250,000km radius Federal Capital city. It was supposed to have been built within 25 years from the day it was established 35 years ago. Within that, we have 78 districts and eight sector areas.
“So far, we have done five districts and two sector areas within 35 years. Within that period, the issue of social and affordable housing has not been embedded in the planning aspect. Of course, we borrowed the concept of the city from Brasilia in Brazil, where the satellite towns feed the city with a robust transportation system. But we did not even develop our transportation system until under President Goodluck Jonathan when we started the light rail project.”
While agreeing that many houses in the territory were vacant years after completion, he threatened that such landlords would be surcharged. “We are going to charge those houses that are empty and not being occupied by anyone. One: it is to stem the tide of corruption where some politicians buy such houses and keep. This has security implications. Already, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is working with us to make sure we know those who own the houses that are being kept in highbrow places in Abuja that are not being occupied. We shall charge them, and we shall confiscate them. Our property tax will be introduced; it would be able to do away with all the irregularities because it is a whole gamut of problems we want to address by legislation and by investment drive.
