- By Kunle Oyatomi
In mid-November Nigeria’s central government under President Bola Tinubu moved to take on the sore challenge of the housing deficit across the land. In one fell swoop, the Federal Executive Council, FEC, took the unprecedented step of approvingN250b investment fund to tackle the malaise, which had for long dimmed the economic prospects of the giant of Africa and the scores of millions of its citizens. It’s a real estate intervention intent to provide enduring succor and affordable mortgages to the people.
The initiative was unearthed by Finance Minister, Wale Edun, after the weekly FEC gathering in Abuja, presided over by the president. Edun said the project fits into a strategy to stimulate ‘’long–term economic growth.’’ He described it as the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) Real Estate Investment Fund, explaining that it ‘’will offer low-cost mortgages to individuals seeking to own homes, with interest rates targeted at single-digit or low double-digit figures.
The minister believes that at its peak, MOFI’s exceptional modus operandi will make it possible for the citizens ‘’access mortgages with interest rates ranging between 11 per cent to 12 per cent, a significant reduction from the current market rates that often exceed 30 per cent. The point being made is that no longer would the larger segment of the country not have an alternative in meeting their housing concerns. Also, no longer would they be fleeced by shylock land speculators and their bank sector conspirators. There’s more: this initiative will go in no little way to improve the living standards of the people, notably the low-income earners and the superannuated along with not in the net of the civil service.
In a land where we have grim statistics and graphically gory images of countless people making the underbelly of bridges their homes all over the land, this is cheering news from the government of Tinubu. This intervention is meant for them, even if its long-haul is aimed at moving the national economy to an enviable plane. You can’t talk of a good economy if your policies don’t benefit the masses of the country you govern. What’s the point of your administration if your people don’t enjoy affordably decent housing in the 21st Century, an age where one of the indices of performance is habitable quarters for your people?
Indeed, the huge housing shortfalls in the underdeveloped societies of the world are said to be responsible for its cyclical crises. These lead to the unintended erection of shanties and ghettos in the urban and semi-urban centres of the land. These are crime scenes that large crowds of young people drawn away from the rural areas to the towns and metropolis. They form dangerous gangs that become a law unto themselves. They threaten the peace of law-abiding citizens, as they outnumber the security personnel.
Unscrupulous politicians reach out to them to unleash mayhem on their opponents during elections and when there are protests against so-called unpopular policies of the incumbent government. These homes of those deprived of decent habitation are n most cases no-go areas for the Police the people lean on for deliverance. Besides this toxic existence of theirs, these ‘homeless’ citizens put undue pressure on the urban facilities like housing, roads, schools, health centres, power etc. Because they are accommodated in the statistics of the inhabitants of the city, there’s no planning to capture them in the picture of the infrastructure for the landscape. You can’t plan for ghost and clandestine intruders and those who operate outside of the system, those who storm the urban areas and all they do is to establish slums, which in turn attract kindred spirits.
It’s the reason the whole country was alarmed when a report recently claimed that Nigeria faces an acute deficit of approximately 28 millionn housing units. According to statistics, this puts the housing in grave turmoil, with experts warning that we would need 700,000 new homes annually to clear the backlog.
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The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and our own National Bureau of Statistics agree. And they predict that if Nigeria is going to grow by over 200 million by 2050, a potential social crisis is lurking in the shadows if we don’t deal with the housing deficit, which is creating more cradles of time bombs in the form of slums.
There’s incontrovertible evidence that the efforts of previous governments to tackle this disturbing issue have not failed because of the lack of ideas or failure to give attention to it. Not at all. Indeed, if we look back at the reports, we shall come across tomes of documents addressing the matter, both in military and civilian dispensations. Even the state administrations have not been wanting. So what has been the drawbacks?
Experts say the main challenge over the decades is lack of funding the lofty ideas about solutions to the housing crisis. They argue that when the papers are presented at seminars, workshops and executive gatherings for a mortal blow to nail the scourge, there isn’t an accompaniment of strategic funding and monitoring. Therefore, while there would appear to be a grand bureaucracy around the issue, it soon runs into severe deadly storms and shipwrecks, being denied the necessary funding. Thus, it’s not that we failed to look in the direction of a social threat.
Many believe that the Tinubu government has refused to follow the beaten track over the question of the vexed housing deficit. Unlike the others before him, Tinubu, after a study of why the earlier approaches crashed, has brought up a multibillion budget upfront to take the bull by the horns. He’s giving it Grade A attention in the hands of a minister he is directly supervising.
Secondly, Tinubu is tying the resolution of the chaotic housing sector to his macroeconomic agenda. Now, as a strategist, this frees him from the tunnel vision that held down others and prevented a bold outlook. In so doing he is according the initiative its true honour: an inviolate human right input, a constitutional demand, the same way the citizens are entitled to food, security and education.
Observers say this is where President Tinubu is poised for success, all things being equal, where others failed to see the provision of befitting housing for the people as a fundamental human right. He is thus bound by the force of the Constitution he swore on oath to respect. Others hardly saw the matter from that sacred and hallowed precincts and therefore did not go beyond the drawing board.
•Oyatomi Esq. is on the Board of the Independent Media and Policy Initiative, IMPI, a think tank based in Abuja.