Every country in the world is experiencing urbanization in different dimensions. Urbanization has been defined as the increased concentration of people in cities rather than in rural areas. It is the gradual increase in the number of people living in urban areas, with subsequent decrease in those living in rural areas.
Urbanization is an ongoing trend in both developed and developing countries, including Nigeria. From the post-independence era, the country started experiencing migration at an increasing rate as people moved from the rural areas to the urban centres in pursuit of better living conditions. Like every other nation of the world, the migration has been causing rapid and extensive growth in the urban centres.
The migration to major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and Kano is at an alarming rate. Take Lagos for instance, a city of less than 1.5 million in 1970, Lagos is growing so fast that population estimates vary by more than 10 million. The Lagos Bureau of Statistics says it’s 26 million now, the federal government says it’s 21 million, and international institutions put it at around 15 to 16 million.
With a housing deficit of 2.5 million units, more than two-thirds of Lagos’s residents live in slums that are among the least hospitable on Earth, according to Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing.
“People are living in some of the worst, if not the worst, conditions I’ve seen in the world, and I’ve been to all the big slums in India, Kenya, South Africa,” Farha said during a visit to the country in September. While most government officials agree the affordable housing shortage is a crisis, they have little idea how to respond.
New apartment towers and luxury housing estates are rising in these urban centres like Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. But they’re intended for foreign oil workers and the small group of Nigerians who can obtain mortgages or afford to pay cash, not the families crowded into crumbling units with seven to a room and limited access to clean water and sanitation. Most of the developers’ focus is on high-end units amid a shortage of affordable housing which mirrors that of builders in cities around the world.
Most government efforts so far have been designed to help people buy homes with government mortgages. Very few Nigerians have access to home loans from banks. There are only around 50,000 home mortgages in the entire country. And with Nigerian inflation in double digits, most lenders that do provide home loans charge at least 20%, according to a Nigerian central bank survey.
The government should begin with the basics, said the U.N.’s Farha. It should prioritize improving informal settlements by giving people the right to live there and upgrading infrastructure, she said. That way they would lose their fear of being evicted by police, who regularly raze slums, and invest in their communities.
In 2019, the federal government announced plans to deliver one million affordable houses every year in a bid to address housing deficit in the country. Minister of state, works and housing, Abubakar Aliyu announced the plans during an inspection of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mass housing project in Zuba, Federal Capital Territory and said that the government is set to provide enabling environment to attract investors into the housing sector for the project to commence.
Before that, the government created Family Homes Funds, Nigeria’s biggest social housing fund, that is leading the way when it comes to forging beneficial partnerships across the housing sector to improve the affordable housing drive in Nigeria.
With the lofty goal of building at least 500,000 houses for low and middle income earners by 2023, the Fund’s MD, Femi Adewole has recognised the importance of partnering with other government institutions, state governments, financial, mortgage institutions, research and development agencies to achieve this goal.
The Fund is currently working on at least 20 projects in different states of the federation including Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Kano, Delta, Ogun, FCT, and this has only been possible because of how they are tapping into the comparative advantages of their partners. The Fund has confirmed that more positive outcome of the partnership with these states will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The efforts of Family Homes Funds are commendable and more of such is needed if the low and middle income earners in the urban cities will have an affordable roof over their heads. It is hoped that the government will also encourage private developers through giving of incentives like tax holidays to encourage them to build homes that an average man can buy.
