The gap between those who own homes and those who don’t continues to widen, and will continue to do so unless the government takes concrete and meaningful steps in tackling the housing needs of the citizens of the country.
This was the view of an expert in housing and property development based in Lagos, Mr Amadi Adiele, in a chat with Tribune Property, recently.
“The gap between those who are house owners in Nigeria and those who don’t have houses is very wide, and sadly, the gap continues to widen with time. This is largely due to the disposition of the government to housing matters in the country.
“It is unthinkable to have a government whose schemes are largely designed to take care of only a small fragment of the populace. Most of the schemes put in place by the government are so elaborately designed that the conditions surrounding them can only be met by influential people in the society, what about the low income earners who are more in population than the high income earners?” Mr Adiele queried.
He further added that reduced schemes that should, for example, take care of the housing needs of up to 3,000 Nigerians only meet the need of just a little above half of that because such schemes are designed to take care of just a handful of people.
He insisted that government schemes, unlike the private ones, should be meant to make smaller units of land available with a view to enabling low income earners to become house owners.
Another expert Mr Adetutu Simeon corroborated this idea, but he attributed the current housing shortage the nation is facing partly due to poor infrastructural development, which according to him, creates a limitation on where people could build houses.
“The problem of infrastructure is aggravated by the way estates are planned whereby large plot allocation denies six families the opportunity of owning homes in every one hectare,” he argued.