Nigeria’s housing crisis is often reduced to simple arithmetic – a deficit of 22 million units, a mantra recited without reflection. Yet our cities paint a different picture.
Lagos’ frontiers brim with vacant luxury low-rises designed for diaspora investors and glass towers for expatriates, while families squeeze into single-room “face-me-I-face-you” tenements unfit for habitation. Abuja’s Maitama glitters with duplexes for bureaucrats, yet security guards and street vendors sleep in shacks beneath bridges.
Policymakers chant, “Set the market free – build, build, build,” even as billions fund white-elephant satellite towns. These projects orchestrate a game of musical chairs: Nigeria’s shrinking middle class shuffles from rentals to crippling mortgages, while vacated properties remain unaffordable for the urban poor.
This obsession with quantity obscures a critical truth: how we use finite land matters more than the volume of units. Solutions recycled from discredited neoliberal playbooks ignore reality – over 60 percent of urban Nigerians are renters, trapped in a predatory informal market. Luxury towers may signal progress, but when they stand empty while teachers and nurses endure four-hour commutes from slums, they symbolise failed urban planning.
The crisis is not a lack of homeownership. It is the opposite: a growing underclass, excluded from ownership and increasingly priced out of rentals. For those surviving on poverty wages, mortgages are unattainable, and a million new Ibeju-Lekki estates will not make their rents more affordable.
We cling to the myth that markets self-correct, believing developers’ self-interest will birth functional cities. But housing is societal scaffolding, not a spreadsheet. Surrendering it to profit-driven whims rigs cities against ordinary Nigerians, eroding dignity and productivity.
Roots of the crisis
Nigeria’s housing inequality is rooted in colonial policies that prioritised extraction over development. British rule dismantled precolonial urban systems, reshaping cities into cartographies of power. Lord Lugard’s 1914 mandate enforced racial segregation via “white reservations,” justified with pretexts of sanitation and malaria control, while “native quarters” were confined to overcrowded peripheries. Housing for colonial employees – from domestic workers’ “boys’ quarters” to migrant labour barracks – created enclaves designed for the expedience of labour exploitation, not metropolitan life.
This spatial apartheid suppressed native urbanisation, ensuring labour remained in rural mines and farms, while quelling challenges to the legitimacy of the native authority figures required to sustain Lugard’s system of indirect rule. It provided stability for exploitation, as British MP Colonel Wedgewood boasted in 1938: “There has been trouble from every other colony under the British flag, but no trouble from Nigeria.”
Post-independence elites entrenched these frameworks. The 1978 Land Use Act centralised land ownership under governors, enabling mass dispossession. Communal systems gave way to speculative markets, with elites seizing rural land for urban expansion. Colonial administrative zones became enclaves for expatriates and politicians, while growing slums became the proverbial “boys’ quarters” of Nigeria’s wealthy. The hierarchies endured, veiled by neoliberal rhetoric.
Decaying colonial infrastructure and uncontrolled urbanisation deepened the crisis. Colonial drainage systems in cities like Ibadan, built for segregated townships, now flood informal settlements. Lagos, designed for 500,000 residents in 1960, strains under 23.3 million despite absorbing land from both its border and coast. Northern cities absorb climate-displaced farmers into slums like Kano’s Dorayi, while ethno-religious land conflicts persist.
Today, according to the World Bank’s Adequate Housing Index, 87 million Nigerians live in subhuman conditions, with 60 percent of urban Nigerians in informal settlements. From Lugard’s buffer zones to kleptocratic land grabs, housing inequality is no accident — it is engineered exclusion.
Anatomy of market failure
The housing market’s failure to meet need is not unique to Nigeria. Globally, private sector development is misaligned with public need; the market is ill-equipped for the task. The private sector’s operational logic — prioritising short-term returns amid high political and financial risks — shapes supply in ways that neglect broader urban functionality. Developers, driven by profit maximisation, focus on high-margin luxury units for sale to a landlord class seeking stable assets, rather than addressing housing as a public good. Three disconnects emerge:
First, a spatial myopia. Developers optimise for factors which enhance immediate asset value rather than holistic city-building, targeting areas with existing or new government infrastructure investments, for luxury blocks. This pattern feeds infrastructural inequity by pricing low and medium-income earners out of well-served areas.
Second, a tension between shelter and investment: Property’s dual role as shelter and investment asset creates divergent interests, incentivising landlords to prioritise short-term gains like shortletting – which generates higher yields with lower occupancy – or speculative land holding, over long-term affordability. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s pervasive upfront annual rent model emanates from a risk intolerance on the part of landlords.
Third, a poor appetite for low-income segments. Luxury units achieve quicker returns. Conversely, low-income housing—where demand far exceeds purchasing power – requires patient capital. Market logic thus perpetuates a cycle: those most in need of housing are least able to influence the nature and price of its supply.
Breaking ground: Towards a way forward
While the market can efficiently allocate resources to high-yield segments, its atomistic participants lack the perspective and will to confront the existential developmental challenges posed by the aggregate of their decisions. The housing question is about more than bricks and mortar; our decisions shape our cities, and our cities, in turn, shape us. To build a nation of walled citadels is to mortgage Nigeria’s collective future.
Labour fuels Nigeria’s dynamism, but its dignity is shackled where shelter remains a privilege. Development cannot thrive when housing is reduced to a luxury for the few. From Lagos’s sprawling face-me-I-face-you tenements to Abuja’s unregulated rents, Nigeria’s workers — street traders, artisans, civil trapped in a cycle where precarious housing undermines productivity, health, and belonging.
Nigeria’s history offers both lessons and sprouts. Post-independence housing schemes, though limited, hinted at shelter as a right tied to nation-building. Today, speculative markets and weak policy have overtaken this vision. Yet the principle remains: housing is not a commodity but the bedrock from which workers sustain families, innovate, and drive economies.
A paradigm shift is urgent. We must reimagine housing as infrastructure for dignity-expanding renters’ rights, social housing, and regulation of rental markets. This demands the political will to prioritise equity over pathologies of the poor.
The next article in this series explores global social housing models — from Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida to Singapore’s public flats — to inspire solutions for Nigeria.
