Aliyu Abubakar1, Mohammed Umar2, Rukaiyatu Ahmed3
1Department of Architecture, Faculty of Environmental Sciences,
Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Yola – Nigeria
2Department of Political Science,
Faculty of Humanities, Management and Social Sciences, Federal University Kashere, Gombe – Nigeria
3Department of Environmental Sciences and Toxicology, Federal University Dutse, Jigawa State - Nigeria Correspondence Email: [email protected]
Abstract: Contemporary demand for housing in Nigeria has reached an unparalleled extent due to mitigating factors such as human population growth and urbanisation. With a population close to 200 million people, Nigeria has a housing shortfall of more than 17 million housing units that is forecast to grow annually at two million houses. Urban areas, especially the capital city, are the most hit due to inhabitants‘ migration in search of economic opportunities. This study assesses previous housing provision strategies and their outcome and investigates the factors that hinder the access to adequate affordable housing in Nigeria. Data for the study was mainly drawn from secondary sources, through an extensive literature review of previous housing provision programmes in Nigeria. Other sources of data include informal discussion and interviews with key stakeholders in the housing sector.
The study found that major barriers to housing provision in Nigeria are in the form of legal, economic, physical, socio-cultural, and professional constraints. Furthermore, the government‘s weak institutional and political will to housing the urban poor is aggravating the phenomenon. For housing to be adequate, realistic policies need to be put in place and implementation vigorously pursued. Also, such policies should embrace a bottom-up approach which engages genuine participation of the urban poor at grassroots level.
Introduction
Sufficient shelter is identified globally as a basic need of life and a prerequisite to human survival. It is an essential need of the human being without which existence is not feasible (Olotuah &Aiyetan, 2006). In a related development, Obi & Ubani (2014) opined that housing plays a vital role in the amplification of human health, social and economic welfare of the society. Globally, housing the urban poor in suitable conditions has continued to be a tussle. This is even more severe in developing countries like Nigeria. The pace of urbanisation, the rate of economic growth, the unavailability of land for housing, the absence of infrastructure, the increase in land prices, inappropriate plans for urban planning and land appropriation all directly contribute to this problem. (Aduwo, Edewor, & Ibem 2016) observed that in Africa, the fast pace of urbanisation has come with complex management
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challenges in services such as housing. The challenges appear to be enormous and difficult to control. Governments of many developing countries, in the face of enormous housing demands as a result of rapid population growth and massive urbanisation, initially based their policies on those similar to post-war housing programmes of developed countries such as Britain (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, 1996). However, most of the attempts to implement housing programmes for the urban poor have failed or recorded limited success due to inappropriate planning and land policies (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2009).
In Nigeria, even under the enabler approach the private sector has failed to provide sufficient housing units especially for the masses that need and demand it. Housing production is at approximately 100,000 units per year and this is highly inadequate with statistics establishing that at least 1 million units are needed yearly to bridge the 17 million housing shortage.
Estimates project that the sum of US$363 billion will be required to curb Nigeria‟s current housing shortfall, and this is expected to continue growing annually (Centre for Human Settlements, 1984). These acute shortages have resulted in a high urban housing deficiency both quantitatively and qualitatively (Ozo, 1990). The deficit trend continued to grow over the past decades. In 2012, the World Bank reported that Nigeria had a housing deficit of 17 million, in 2018, the World Bank stated that Nigeria needed to provide 700,000 housing units every year, while it was producing only 100,000 at the time.
In October 2020, during the World Habitat day, the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria reported that the current Nigerian housing deficit is 22 million (AHMED, 2020), most of which are in the large urban cities, like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja and Kano. The report also stated that about 16 billion dollars investment was required to remedy the situation.
Objectives
This study sets out to assess previous housing provision strategies and their output and investigate the barriers to the successful delivery of affordable housing in Nigeria and what needs to be done to address them.
The first part of the report is a literature review of the previous housing provision strategies in Nigeria since independence to date. The second part outlines and discusses the drivers that militate against adequate provision of affordable housing in Nigeria whilst the final part of the report makes informed recommendations as to how the situation can be improved.
Review of Related Literature on the Acute Shortage of Affordable Housing Problems in Nigeria and Previous to Remedy it.
In Nigeria, Ikejiofor (2014) argues that low-income housing in urban areas is worse now than a decade earlier. This is due largely to increasingly high urban growth rates and worsening economic and political climate. Massive urbanisation in contexts of extreme poverty and limited state capacity, together with intense competition for resources, has perpetuated enormous deficiencies in both the quality and quantity of housing, and current indicators show that the problems are not about to abate. Olotuah and Taiwo (2015) argue that housing is a major area of deprivation for the urban poor in Nigeria, where the rate of provision of new housing stock has lagged behind the rate of population growth, which is responsible for the formulation of slums, growth of squatter settlements and high rent beyond the affordable limit of most citizens.
The increasing housing shortfall in Nigeria is attributed to the increase in slums; rising from 24 million in 1990 to 46 million in 2005 (United Nations Human Settlements Programme,
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2009). In 2018, the World bank reported that Nigeria needed 700,000 housing units annually to tackle the severe shortage. The Federal Mortgage of Nigeria, in October 2020, also reported that the deficit now stands at 22 million. The urban poor are the most affected by this acute shortages. In an attempt solve their housing problems, they often put up substandard structure with temporary makeshift building materials in slums areas of major cities.
The factors found to be common in the slum building process of major cities of Nigeria like Abuja, Jos, Lagos, and Port Harcourt are those of unplanned population growth leading to acute shortage in supply of adequate housing for low-income and poor households and an inadequate arrangement for effective management of urban growth and expansion (Daniel, et al, 2015). This has led to a deteriorating housing situation of the majority of the population in Nigeria (Olotuah and Taiwo, 2015). The Nigerian government formulated various policies that include provider-oriented public driven programmes, the enabler policies that involve enhancing the capacity of the private sector to deliver houses through the open market.
However, despite these policies, housing problems continue to linger. A plethora of literature identified various drivers that militate against adequate housing provision in Nigeria. The major drivers of housing shortage in Nigeria are enumerated as follows:
● Impact of unplanned population growth
● High cost of building materials and reliance on importation
● Inconsistent housing policies and programmes
● Inadequate local knowledge and skilful manpower
● Inadequate infrastructure
● Corruption and weak political will
● Inadequate housing finance, mortgage and high interest rates due to inflation From reviewed literature, a timeline for housing policies, initiatives and provision from 1960 – 2011 is tabulated below:
Year Type of
government
Government programme/policy
Plan Outcome
1962-68 Initially civilian administration, military regime afterwards
First National Development Plan
- Limited and majorly elitist in form of middle- and high-class housing for only government officials
- Develop and expand Government Reserved Areas (GRA), this is a scheme earmarked to accommodate colonial masters
- Proposed 24,000 housing units
Completed about 500 housing units
1970-74 Military regime
Second National Development Plan
- Government policy-wise embraced housing as a social/political responsibility
- First national housing programme
- Housing for high-, middle- and low-income groups (60 percent low-income, 25 percent
Completion rate of about 20 per cent achieved
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middle-income, and 15 percent high-income) - Established the National Housing Commission and Federal Housing Authority (FHA) - Proposed 54,000 housing units
- Allocated 15,000 units to Lagos (then Nigeria‟s capital), and 4,000 units in each of the other 11 states
1975-78 Military regime then civilian administration
Third National Development Plan
- Readjusted policy and planning in numerical dimension
- Construct 202,000 housing units (with Lagos allocated 46,000 units, while the other 156,000 units to be constructed in the remaining states)
Achieved 19 percent completion in Lagos and 13 percent in the remaining states
1979-1982
Civilian Administration
Fourth National Development plan
Planned to provide mass housing through sites and services, partly funded by world bank, state governments and federal mortgage bank, targeting 8 States with
pilot project
implemented in Bauchi state between 1979 and 1982 at the cost of
$29.7m Dollars.
Only pilot project in Bauchi was completed, the rest were suspended.
1981-85 Civilian administration, the military regime
Fourth National Development Plan
- Launched for the first time National Housing Program
- Proposed 440,000 units mainly for low-income earners with 8 million housing units to be completed by the year 2000
Achieved about 24 percent completion.
1986-91 Military regime
National Housing Policy of 1988
- All Public housing programmes were terminated by military regime on grounds of difficult economic condition in the country.
- The National Housing Policy launched in 1988
Housing Projects were suspended
1991-99 Military regime
-National Housing Policy of 1991
-National Housing Programme 1994/95
- Set a goal of providing all Nigerians “access to decent housing by 2000”
in response to the United Nations
“Housing for all by the year 2000”
5,500 housing units were completed under a program “access to decent housing”
2,000 units completed under Site-and-Services scheme
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- Construct 700,000 units annually with 121,000 on Site-and-Services scheme.
Provision of rural infrastructure through setting up of an agency
known as the
Directorate of Food, Roads, and Rural Infrastructure
2000-11 Civilian administration
-Housing and Urban Development Policy - Social Housing Programme
- „Abuja at 30‟
Housing scheme
- Overcome housing deficit through revising the Land Use Act of 1978
- Launch of New National Housing and Urban Development Policy with the goal of enabling private sector to provide decent housing to Nigerians - Construct over 10,000 units through Public-Private Partnership (PPP) across in all states.
- Construct 500 units through the Presidential Mandate Housing Scheme in all state capitals and the Federal Capital Territory (Abuja)
- Pilot project to construct about 40,000 housing units in all states annually.
- Provide social housing to low and middle-income groups;
commercialised development sites - Construct as a pilot project 1000 social
housing units
nationwide.
Minimal impact from the newly established Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development
- Failure of take-off of some enacted housing policies such as the Presidential Mandate Housing Scheme and social housing
- Some isolated successes recorded in some states (2000 serviced plots through PPP Sites-and-Services in Lagos, 4,400 housing units completed in Abuja, Porthacourt, Akure and Abeokuta through PPP)
Table 1: Timeline of Nigeria‟s Housing policies and implementation. Source: Ademiluyi (2010), Muhammad, et al (2015), Daniel, et al (2015), Ibem (2011) and Van Eard, et al (2008).
Barriers to Adequate Delivery of Affordable Housing in Nigeria
Legal constraints
Planning regulations and building regulation codes are inhibiting housing production in Nigeria. Jibril and Garba (2012) noted that there are gross inadequacies and bureaucracies within the planning laws and implementation. This has led to inadequate planning and monitoring, as well as inadequate supervision of housing projects during construction, and
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this results in buildings being erected without proper building permits or at wrong locations.
There is also the setting up unrealistic standards of housing quality not matching the need and ability of most of the population. This according to Fowler (2008) ends up pushing low-income earners to the fringes in search of accommodation. This frequently results in the development of unplanned slums, housing shortages or both.
The Land Use Act of 1978, which posits land ownership at the hands of government, is meant to ease the process of obtaining land for various land uses; including housing development.
The law was conceived as a progressive piece of legislation designed to introduce a comprehensive National Law Policy that gives every Nigerian the right to use and enjoy land in the country (Morah, 1993). This has failed, since most land transactions are not only conducted on an informal land market, but it is also the primary form of supply for urban development in Nigerian cities (NBS, 2012). Part of its flaw is that the Land Use Act is a nationalisation instrument that took away the right of ownership and management from the citizenry and vested it in the state (Daniel, 2014), thus leaving access to land only to the privileged members of the society. With land title being a primary requirement to obtain any form of housing finance, bureaucracies and costs in processing titles are also major obstacles to housing provision.
Economic impediments
The National Bureau of Statistics reports that the poverty rate in Nigeria rose from 69 percent in YEAR to 71 percent in 2011 with an increase in unemployment from above 12 million to over 14 million within the same period (Abubakar & Doan, 2014). This comes on top of an already low level of affordability in Nigeria. Access to housing is made even more difficult due to the inability of about 70 percent of inhabitants to access housing mortgages, given that most people lack the collateral required and high mortgage interest rates (Ayedun &
Olawatubi, 2011). The current pro-market housing policies in Nigeria have placed emphasis on private sector provision in line with the global trend, on the assumption that the government will provide an enabling environment. While housing is financed through a number of institutional sources (Adedeji & Olotuah, 2012), the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) is Nigeria‟s secondary mortgage institution that is primarily tasked with lending money to housing developers through the Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs) (Muhammad et al, 2015). The FMBN is expected to broker a partnership for mobilising finance from Deposit Money Banks, insurance companies, workers and foreign investors.
However, due to a lack of funding and inconsistent support from the government, the FMBN is in a poor financial position to provide both finance to private housing developers in form of estate development loans and mortgages for housing to individuals through the PMIs. The Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2012 asserts that the limit in funding is compounded by the conservative lending policy of insurance companies and commercial banks‟ cold feet towards the long terms loans that housing projects require. The result of this is that housing developers resort to providing commercial housing to the high-income earners since most of them operate on short-term loans from commercial banks which must be recovered within a short period of time.
Socio-cultural perceptions
Often, Nigerian housing policies and programs fail to meet the desired long-term intent in terms of socio-cultural aspects of sustainability because promulgated policies are treated as projects rather than a process. A plethora of literature argue that policies tend to ignore the socio-cultural aspirations of beneficiaries and often designs of housing projects fail to consider the socio-cultural needs of low-income groups (Muhammad et al, 2015 and Jibril,
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2015). This is established in Morah‟s (1993) argument that policy officials in Abuja perceive medium and high-income housing to be more germane to the image and status of the city than low-cost dwellings affordable by most of the population. As a result, preferences in housing in the city favour sophisticated Western-style house designs, materials and layouts, over the indigenous local styles, materials and resources.
Additionally, where the government has made efforts to target low-income populations in their housing programmes, they are often misconceived and have no cultural relevance to them. For instance, if we take the Shagari housing scheme across the country in the early 80s as an example, the low income and the medium income parts of the project were differentiated by the number of bedrooms provided, but the styles are same: imported Western style plans.
As we know, at least in the northern part of Nigeria, many low-income earners also have multiple wives and large families and can hardly be accommodated in a western style one-bedroom house, even if it is the only thing they could afford. Consequently, they are excluded from the projects meant to benefit them.
Physical challenges
Major cities such as Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Kano are experiencing huge influxes of people from various parts of the country. With a fast pace of urbanisation comes an added pressure on land and infrastructure. Instead of solving problems associated with land ownership, the Land Use Act has in a way validated the informal market with speculators capitalising to maximise their profit. This is evident in the assessment of a review committee set up by the government in 2010 to assess the performance of private developers, which established that developers sublet portions of allotted land to them to other developers for uses unrelated to housing development (Ikejiofor, 2014). In many parts of the nation‟s capital Abuja, plots of land are allocated for housing developments despite the absence of basic infrastructure. This is not only common in Abuja but is the case in most Nigerian cities. This not only brings a transportation problem but also a security challenge within most of the housing estates. This is hindered by a lack of integrated strategy for providing residential infrastructure in policy documents. Olayiwola et al (2005) opined that while the National Housing Policy clearly specified that the government would provide infrastructure facilities in layouts preparatory to allocation to developers, this is hardly implemented. This seems to have encouraged developers to renege on their responsibility of making residential layouts with the secondary infrastructure such as power, water and access roads within the housing estates. As such, these government policies are not vigorously implemented, and the government‟s failure to honour its part has succeeded in weakening its ability to compel the housing developers and cooperatives to honour theirs.
Weak political and professional interest
The high political instability in the country, coupled with an over centralised mechanism of decision making and execution, has led to gross inconsistencies in planning and organisational structures associated with housing programmes (Jibrin, 2015). The success of housing provision in developed countries has largely been on the strong political will of successive governments to continue with policies that are deemed beneficial to the citizens.
On the other hand, the inability of the private sector to provide housing for low-income groups is attributed to their unrestrained profit motive which has led to the selection of the privileged and high-income earners as preferred target beneficiaries of most of the few government housing projects (Ikejiofor, 2014). Nigeria is a multi-tribal country with about 300 different tribes, and these tribal groups over time have created their own form of housing,
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specifically adapting to their particular way of life. These housing diversities can be seen from the Ijaw form of housing constructed in riverine areas of the Niger-Delta region to that of the pastoral Fulani thatched in the north-eastern part of the country. Despite this, housing programmes hardly recognises this diversity, and instead of adopting a bottom-up approach that encourages local participation, programmes are often top-down, with both policy makers and housing providers opting for Western style buildings in a bid to remain „modern‟. In the end, those policies alienate the low-income groups even though they are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
Conclusion and Recommendations:
For adequate and affordable housing to be achieved, the lengthy, cumbersome and costly process of regulatory approval in housing delivery needs to be curtailed. While certain measures are necessary to ensure safety adherence to master plans, extensive delays and the setting up of realistic building regulations that meet the minimum safety standard need to be considered. The bureaucracies enshrined in the process of obtaining land and title documents needs to be eliminated. This is not only because land is the first requirement to housing development but also because – notwithstanding other criteria – sourcing housing finance from financial institutions in Nigeria hinges on providing valid title documents. Globally, finance is an intractable issue in housing development, and Nigeria is no exception.
Therefore, the laws around housing finance require urgent reform. There is a need to promulgate laws that mandate financial institutions such as commercial banks, as well as the federal government, to recapitalise the ailing Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria. The government ought to do more in mandating commercial banks to provide long term funding to both housing providers and individuals aiming to self-build. The introduction of micro-finance schemes would go a long way in aiding access to housing micro-finance to low-income groups.
The fact that contemporary reality suggests a low level of affordability underlines the compelling need to review Nigeria‟s wage structure. This will facilitate low-income group‟s access to credit. While there are a lot of things involved in housing delivery such as finance, secure tenure and technology, all of those put together are not as important as how much the particular beneficiary could afford to save for housing or the credit they could access as a result of their earning ability. It is important to enforce policies that make housing development layouts liveable by putting in place basic infrastructure such as roads, drainages, central sewers, electricity and water supply before housing developers are allowed to build.
Government needs to provide incentives to developers interested in low-income schemes.
Such incentives could be in the form of providing housing developers free access to land with basic infrastructure in place, waiving taxes associated with property development, and the development of local building materials in order to eliminate the reliance on importation. For housing to be sustainable there is a need for continuous provision. This will also require continuity in government policies. Furthermore, such policies should embrace a bottom-up approach which engages genuine participation of low-income groups at grassroots level.
Government housing schemes should explore the use of cheaper, local and traditional building material to increase affordability. More funding for research into local building materials is also required to find ways of strengthening and making them durable and affordable. This will not only reduce the need to import, but also will boost our industries and create jobs, while ensuring the supply of building materials is constant, affordable and sustainable.