Professor Gbenga Nubi, an affordable housing advocate, is a Lecturer in the Department of Estate Management, University of Lagos. He speaks on the need to improve Nigeria’s building construction methods while introducing modern technology to facilitate large-scale low-cost housing production if Nigerians must be housed adequately in this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI. He also warned that it would be difficult for Nigeria to attain low-cost housing for citizens as long as importation of building materials is encouraged.
It seems that the provision of low-cost housing by both the government and the private sector is going into extinction going by the high cost of housing. What’s your take?
We can’t give up on our struggle towards low-cost housing. All over the world, what we are experiencing in Nigeria is not unique to Nigeria, so it is a global phenomenon. Cost of construction is high and it is a challenging matter but the vulnerable and those who could not buy houses in different parts of the world, governments have social houses for them because it is so certain that not everyone will be able to afford what we see in the market today. I agree with that.
Government all over the world may make alternative solutions for the vulnerable and for the low income earners; so they provide social housing, key workers housing. This one, where I’m living in the university today, if it is to be rented out at a full market rate. I would not be able to afford it but, because it is government-driven, I could stay in such. So that is how government could intervene and provide for the citizens who could not afford the market price. That is where subsidy comes in and this is where government’s social housing comes in. So, except we do that, we might never attain this low cost.
How can we attain the low-cost?
One of those things to really achieve low-cost is that we have to improve on our building construction methods and introduced technology, make sure that we build on large scale. This is a very simple economic term to improve scale of production. Once we scale up then price would crash, but as long as we are building one by one and developers are being given 100 units per annum, it would be very far. We are coming from a construction site now, which is where we still have development going on in Nigeria today on that scale despite the fact that the government is involved, scale of production is still low. So until we scale up and begin to build en-mass as they are doing in China by bringing in technology, embrace bulk purchase materials, crash down the cost of funding, then we will never be able to attain the low cost that we are talking about. So until we get there, we would just keep on talking about it. People are saying local building materials, I’ve been explaining in the recent times that the nature of materials whether it is local or not, depends on time and space.
When you look at cement, is it a local material?
Yes, because of the 90 per cent of limestone that it constitutes. It is only gypsum that we import. Glass is also a local material because it is made from sand. We begin to look at PVC and see how we can make sure that our petroleum refinery companies do not deliver to us only the products but go as far as giving us PVC. PVC today can be used for partitioning works, windows, doors and ceilings that are byproducts of petroleum. We have to scale up our industry so that our industry begin to produce these things for us. As long as our industry is not producing PVC which we have the opportunity to produce, because we are oil-producing nation, then we would still continue to import them from those who really understand the value chain of refinery and were able to bring to the market different products.
Even with our clay, we can use lesser clay to save the earth. We can innovate the clay and its application to make it readily available even at a cheaper and sustainable cost. These are the things we need to do to really achieve low-cost housing. However, as long as building materials remain imported 60 to 70 percent, 70 to 80 percent according to Omidapo 2002, which I believe has not reduced but increased. As long as we are importing and the costs of these imported materials are subject to the variation of foreign exchange rate, then we would never have low-cost housing
Let me quickly add that, are these cost of construction cheaper in other town? Relatively no. Then how come that the low income earners do have access to good housing? It is made possible because no matter long, how high the cost of anything is, if the payment term is affordable, people will gain access. If you ask me to go and buy a house of N25 million now, I have to pay for it cash and carry, then it is not affordable to me. But when you give me 30 years, 25 years to pay for it, then it becomes affordable. I will be paying an average of N100 million, N1 million in a year and before I know it, it reduces to less than N100,000 in a month. You can see here that affordability sets in, though the price is high but I’m paying over a long period of time, that makes it affordable. This is what they have done. In other nations where we have mortgage bank facilities available for their citizens, we notice that there is this accessibility to home-ownership not because houses were cheap there but the people that buy these high-cost houses pay for them over a long period of time. That makes them affordable and accessible. This is also a major consideration that we have to work in our mortgage Industry so that if at all the struggle or the dream of having low-cost housing eludes us, we still have access to affordable housing that we can live in a dignified environment in our lifetime. So they are all working together: source of funding, mortgage to buy. Then, as long as people are building individually, cost can never come down. When we mass produce, use industrialization, use industrial products, bulk purchase, these are things that can bring about affordable housing.
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