A Saturday morning in July, 13 heads roused from sleep in an open space atop a two-storey building on Wimo Onatere Street in Marina, Lagos. Rising at 4.10 a.m., they constituted early-risers amid the coastal city’s mass of destitute residents. The Friday night before, they huddled atop the building swathed in cotton coverlets and blankets of polythene bags ingeniously sewn together. There, they struck familiar poses in extreme conditions.
Watching the squatters from Room 702 of Beni Hotels, an inn adjacent to the building, it was unsettling to see a buxomly woman strip to her briefs and take her bath few metres from where she slept with fellow male squatters. Although she bathed with her bra and pants on, she left very little to the imagination of anyone interested enough to stare at her curvaceous body. After having her bath, she hurriedly threw on her clothes and sat on a stone ledge, silently waiting on dawn and perhaps a reenactment of the daily hustle that yet denies her the luxury of a decent shelter.
The reporter’s effort to chat her up eventually yielded fruit eight days later and she described herself as Dorothy Agubuike, from Anambra State.
Agubuike lives like a nomad, roaming the streets for menial jobs. She survives on the meagre wage she earns washing plates and fetching water for use at makeshift canteens that litter the boondocks of Lagos Marina. Even so, she scrounges from her paltry wage to pay for temporary boarding at several crude lodges on Lagos Island. She said she was only staying on the high rise building temporarily.
Glancing up at the rooftop of her temporary dwelling, she said she hoped to leave the abode very soon because life on the rooftop was “too dangerous.” Indeed, there are no barricades to prevent fatal fall from the rooftop’s flat concrete expanse and, according to Agubuike, although there had been no report about anyone falling off the building till date, it is only a matter of time before such casualty would be recorded.
Just recently, a squatter almost fell off the building while urinating at midnight. “He was very drunk…thank God for one of his friends who pulled him back by his shirt sleeve,” disclosed Agubuike.
“Whenever it rains, some of us choose to sleep through the torrent, particularly if it’s a tired (slight) drizzle,” revealed the 28-year old. “We pay N200 for a spot in the open space on top of the two-storey building every night. When it rains heavily or the weather becomes too harsh, those that have the means amongst us pay N300 for a warmer spot on the house corridor. But there is hardly any difference really; it becomes too cold sleeping on the corridor sometimes. It is not advisable too as squatters are usually blamed for any theft or robbery that occurs inside the main building,” she said.
“I am saving up to rent a one-room apartment,” said the southeast native who arrived in Lagos from Anambra in 2005 without surety of a dependable livelihood and dwelling. “I was brought here (Lagos) by a distant cousin. He paid my transit fare to Lagos,” she said.
Few weeks after she arrived in Lagos, Agubuike was kicked out by her cousin from the uncompleted building in which she squatted with him. That was because she rebuffed his attempt to pawn her off to a local Madame and owner of a popular brothel off Adesina Street in Ikeja on Lagos mainland. “I refused and he kicked me out of his house. He said that I would never make it in Lagos, but I am determined to show him that I will make it,” she said.
Few streets away, Dozie Matthew pay N200 for a spot on the cold, hard concrete sidewalk few metres from a United Bank of Africa (UBA) branch. According to the fruit hawker and former resident of demolished Badia East slum, he started sleeping on the streets after the house in which he squatted with his childhood friend was razed down by the state government. The wooden shack got trodden last February alongside several others as the state government demolished the slum to make way for over 1,000 one to two-bedroom apartments housing project.
Under the flyover that veers off the route that leads to highbrow Ikoyi, squatters live in dehumanising conditions. Their squalid settlement severely contradicts the Lagos State government’s attempt at a public leisure park comprising a basket ball court and tended garden.
Some of the dwellers there claimed to have been living in the place for a few years. “Many people have labelled us criminals just because we are forced by poverty and necessity to live under the bridge. We are not criminals. We are peace loving citizens forced to live and sleep in the cold because the society has abandoned us,” said an unemployed squatter who simply identified himself as Francis.
Under the bridge, every square foot is claimed by a squatter for sleeping and there is almost no privacy. A young man reclining on a grass patch close to the basket ball court pointed to some concrete ledges three-feet above a garbage heap, saying, “These are beds.”
Several kilometres away, the Third Mainland Bridge, a winding strip of concrete, snakes over deep-set docks, just above the Lagos Lagoon. The bridge winds past a floating shanty town comprising hundreds of wooden houses suspended on stilts and bobbing refuse. The houses, bearing rusty aluminum roofs wreathed in the haze by fumes from neighbouring sawmills and cooking fires, become the major eyesore along the bridge that descends into Lagos mainland and a bedlam of itinerant vendors hurtling through snarling traffic to hawk stale snacks, branded key-holders, handkerchiefs, bottled water, audio CDs and DVDs to commuters.
Beyond the sawmills, the old harbor markets, shanty colonies, the bleak veneer of high-rise housing projects, and the deserted skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island, the omelette of sunset ricocheted against the rickety ruin of a road bed illumining the pathway to a decrepit homestead under a fly-over at Ojodu-Berger.
Like all tumble-downs in the area, it stands in near collapse. Within the makeshift apartment dwells Olayinka Ijaagba, 33, a widow and mother of three. With her eldest child, she inspected her dwelling, a construction of cardboard sheets, polyethylene bags, and withering plywood while she told this reporter that she was “better off where she was, at least for now.” The kindergarten teacher recounted how she was stripped of her valuables and thrown out of her husband’s house by his relatives three weeks after he died.
“I sought refuge with a friend immediately after I got thrown out of the house with my kids but after he accommodated us for four months, his wife started to give us a hard time. You know how insecure we women could get; she thought I wanted to snatch her husband from her. Later I started sleeping in the school premises but when my boss got to know of it, she asked me to stop doing so or risk getting sacked. Ever since I have been living on the streets,” she said.
At two popular eateries in Abule-Egba, Lagos, homeless men, women and children sneak to the premises at midnight every day. They offer the security guards posted to the establishments a fixed fee of N150 to secure a little space to lay their heads till 4.30 am the following day.
“Oftentimes, you have to book for a spot two days earlier as there is usually limited space. And you dare not sleep with your eyes closed as some hoodlums have developed a knack for squatting with us. While everybody is asleep, they attempt to rob us of our valuables and at times rape the women and young girls among us and you can’t even shout or cry for help because that could make the guards refuse you entry the following day. But you can’t really blame them because any noise could attract undue attention and put them in trouble,” disclosed Peter Akinsola, a car accessory vendor.
Why more people are becoming homeless in Lagos
Homeless people like Matthew and Agubuike would readily blame the Lagos State Government for their plight, although reality reveals that apportioning such blame to the government might be tantamount to giving a dog a bad name. The Nation investigations revealed that several displaced or homeless persons arrive in Lagos as immigrants, usually with little support and dependent on a close or distant relative or contact whose assistance is often short-lived and dependent on his or her economic situation.
For instance Colet, 16, was brought to Lagos by her paternal aunt who assured her of employment in highbrow Lekki as a housemaid. But upon arrival, Colet was forced to work in extreme conditions as a commercial sex worker in Agbado-Station, Iju-Ishaga, Lagos; working seven nights a week. With each customer paying her N3, 000 for a five-minute romp, she is struggling to pay off her debt as you read.
Shades of the homeless abound in Lagos. There are those who arrive as immigrants without means of livelihood or decent shelter. Then there are residents who are forced to live on the streets, under the bridge and shanty colonies due to their inability to pay prohibitive rents.
In Lagos, the homeless population grows at an alarming rate, thus making it one of the fastest growing cities, precisely the fifth fastest growing city in the world. Lagos compares only to China’s Beihai, which grows by 10.58 per cent of an annual growth in 2006.
Recently, experts sounded the alarm that less than three per cent of planned housing projects are being delivered annually. The crisis was confirmed by Gimba Ya’u Kumo, Managing Director of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, who said it would require N56 trillion to reverse the nation’s housing deficit of 18 million housing units. The situation reflects the dire housing crisis in the country which is further aggravated by the federal, state and local governments’ inability to confront the problem with the urgency it deserves thus leaving the Nigerian housing sector at the mercy of market forces. Currently, over 80 per cent of Nigerians reportedly live in rented housing compared to 19 per cent in South Africa and 22 per cent in Ghana.
Root of the malaise
According to Joachim Onyike, Head of the Department of Estate Management, Imo State University, Owerri, Imo State, “The situation is compounded by high incidence of corruption in all other relevant sectors of the Nigerian economy and the lack of adequate political will by the government to deal with the housing problem. There is also a conflict of objectives among the major actors in the housing industry namely, the funding institutions and the developers on one side and the consumers of housing on the other side. The profit maximization objective of the developers and funding institutions tends to conflict with the affordability of housing to the housing consumers, especially the low-income earners with the government standing by as a disinterested umpire.”
Consequently, Nigeria suffers very huge and escalating housing deficit which stood at approximately eight million housing units in 1991 and 14 million housing units in 2007. A more recent estimate puts the figure even higher at 18 million housing units. Therefore, at an average cost of N3.12 million per housing unit, the nation would require N56 trillion to fund a housing deficit of 18 million housing units.
Little wonder the country’s urban housing problems, Lagos Island’s for instance, manifest in overcrowding, slumming and the development of shanties in several parts of Nigerian cities. The housing problems vary from inadequate quantity and quality of housing to the attendant impact on the psychological, social, environmental and cultural aspects of housing.
Housing is capital-intensive, no doubt. The cost of adequate housing is currently beyond the reach of most Nigerians. This thus brings in the financial dimension – the question of the affordability of housing. The challenge becomes not only to provide the houses but to make the houses affordable to the average Nigerian worker, according to Onyike.
Houses for rent at prohibitive prices
Prohibitive rents are charged by property developers and house owners across the country. The Nation investigation revealed that most residents of Lagos are groaning under the squeeze of estate agents managing the few available housing units. In Maplewood Estate, Oko-Oba, Agege, Lagos, currently, a detached house of four or five bedrooms in the estate, depending on aesthetic quality, sells between N50 million to N60 million. A block of four flats in the estate sells between N45 million and N50 million, while a wing of four or five bedroom duplex in the estate sells between N35 million and N40 million. These figures show a price rise of properties in the state by 20 to 25 per cent in the last two years.
Three years ago, a detached house in the estate sold for between N40 million and N47 million, while a block of four flats and a wing of duplex sold between N30 and 34 million as well as N30 to 32 million respectively. Rent rates are also very high in the estate. A four or five-bedroom detached house in the estate goes for N800, 000 and N1, 000,000. A four-bedroom flat goes for N400, 000 and N500, 000 while a wing of duplex goes for between N700, 000 and N850, 000.
Currently, a luxury three-bedroom flat at Omole Phase 2 is let out at N900, 000 and N1.2 million per annum. In nearby Ogba, it is between N400, 000 and N600, 000 per annum. At Magodo Government Reservation Area (GRA), the rent paid for a three-bedroom flat N1.1m and N1.2 million per annum. In parts of Ikeja, a three-bedroom flat leases between N950, 000 and N1.5 million annually. In Surulere, a three-bedroom flat goes for between N600, 000 and N800, 000 per annum. In Lekki, a three-bedroom flat at Agungi goes for N1.8m per annum, while a two-bedroom flat in the same area goes for N1.3 million. In Lekki Phase One, a two-bedroom flat attracts N2 million rent. In Ikoyi, a two-bedroom serviced flat goes for N3.5 million per annum with a service charge of N500, 000 per annum. A three-bedroom flat, however, goes for as much as N5m per annum.
In some areas, rents are however, charged in dollars. For example, a four-bedroom serviced luxury flat at Happy Haven Estate, Banana Island, goes for $120,000 per annum, while a tastefully furnished, fully serviced luxury penthouse at Ocean Parade Towers, Banana Island goes for $250,000 per annum.
A coastal city’s cash cow
Alitheia Capital Real Estate reveals in a research note that the up-market areas of Lagos which is also widely known as Nigeria’s commercial capital, are overpriced by as much as 30 per cent. Consequently, to rent a property in Lagos, prospective tenants often have to pay two to three year-advance lease. This is besides the hefty annual fees for facilities and back-up services.
According to Alitheia, construction costs in Nigeria are nearly 15 per cent higher than in South Africa for comparable developments. “This is driven by incessant increase in the cost of building materials (of which 70% is imported), the growing cost of labour, and payments to the Lagos State Government (LASG) on property transactions.”
Renting is however, preferable to most residents than outright purchase because: “There are only a couple of mortgage products available and double digit interest rates (up to 20%) and short tenors (below 10 years) continue to inhibit growth,” according to Alitheia. Home ownership finance, therefore remains inaccessible and unaffordable to 80 per cent of Nigerians.
The Alitheia study revealed that 90 per cent of the housing stock in Lagos is held by less than 10 per cent of the population. However, the State government seeks to redress the situation through its introduction of the new Tenancy Bill. The law seeks to regulate tenancy and rent administration while enhancing access to the current real estate stock by addressing the issue of escalating rent and property values.
The management of land resources is considered to be the major cash cow of Lagos, noted Felix Morka, the executive director of the Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC), which provides legal assistance to evicted slum residents. Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, whose second term expires after elections next year, however, seeks to create a workable city out of the congested coast and landmass that remains the smallest inland area, yet most densely populated of Nigeria’s 36 states. Seventy per cent of Lagosians live in slums, according to Amnesty International and the state government notes that Lagos needs about four million extra homes to close the deficit.
‘Not every house is a home’
In Lagos, the vicious circle of prohibitive rents and homelessness closes daily around low-income earners or what is known in modern parlance as the bottom 99 per cent and past experience indeed, gives no cause for cheer. Since the second National Policy on Housing was announced in 1972 under which about five million housing units were to be delivered by the three tiers of government, less than 200,000 have actually been delivered till date. The Federal Housing Authority has delivered only 35,309 housing units nationwide since it was established in 1973. Alitheia says that in the Lagos Metropolitan Area alone, the number of housing units rose from 393,000 in the late 1970s to 700,000 by 1992 and 1.25 million units in 2012. For a population estimated at over 18 million, the state’s housing shortage is dire indeed and a minimum of 926,562 new units are needed immediately, according to experts.
To Olabisi Iyiola, an architect, more purposeful mass-centred social housing schemes like LagosHOMS are needed. According to her, such schemes, unlike what exists currently, should be geared to assist majority of the low income earners. “Not every house you see around is a home, be it a government housing project or shanty residence. Several indices constituting a wholesome home are oftentimes left out of the equation due to financial and architectural lapses,” she said.
To this end, Governor Fashola claimed he is fulfilling his promise of providing affordable housing through the delivery of homes to residents in the state. Courtesy his LagosHOMS initiative, he intends to alleviate the state’s housing crisis.
“The homes are affordable because there are one, two, three-bedroom designed to fit different income brackets. They are affordable because residents can easily access them and they can pay for them conveniently within a minimum of 10 years,” he said.
According to him, the state’s mortgage scheme is already a success story as 200 homes in estates across the state are allocated monthly to successful applicants. Fashola urged beneficiaries to help strengthen the scheme by fulfilling their obligations to the mortgage.
He emphasised that it was when they serviced their mortgage as required that the government would be able to mobilise more resources to expand the scheme and provide access to more residents. He said the state mortgage board will retrieve the homes from defaulters and refund their contributions, explaining that he had put in place structures to ensure continuity of the programme. “This scheme has been designed to outlive me and continue for a long time,” he said.
But despite the anticipated benefits of the scheme, displaced or homeless Lagosians scattered across the State will continue to nurture no lofty dreams about it. Exactly how grievous their disillusionment is resonate in the desolate cry of a homeless Lagosian like Agubuike: “It is not designed for poor people like me,” she said.
