Muyiwa Adelu, the President of the Association of Town Planning Consultants of Nigeria (ATOPCON), is also the Managing Director, City Matters International. In this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI, he speaks on the nation’s housing deficit and the need for the government to provide an enabling environment for the private developers to plug in rather than getting involved in direct construction of housing units. He also talks about the issues of mortgage, vacant houses in Nigerian cities and ways to curtail the flow of ill-gotten wealth into real estate.
What is your perception of the housing situation in Nigeria?
Housing is one of the three major requirements of man after food and clothing. The challenge we have in this country is that we have not focused on how to provide adequate housing for the people. The Minister of Work and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, said at a time said we had shortage of housing; but there are so many houses with vacancies when you go to Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Apo and Garki, among others. So why are they saying there is shortage of houses? Some of us laughed. The minister knew what he was talking about and some of us knew what he was talking about. But the point is that the houses that are available are not adequate for the people.
Why are they not adequate?
The houses are not adequate because they are too expensive. They built a house and asked a fresh graduate to buy at N5millon and N10million; where will he or she get the money? That is why we said we have shortage of housing.
What do we do to ensure that is assuaged?
The government has a lot of works and roles to play. For me as a town planner and built environment expert, I have canvassed on several occasions that government should not involve in the provision of houses as it is. Government has no business in direct construction of houses. In the United Kingdom (UK), yes, councils do provide houses; but Nigeria is not a welfare state! So if you are not a welfare state, why did you go ahead to build houses? How many houses can the government build? Since the tenure of former governor of Lagos State, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, now late, how many houses has the Lagos State Government built? How many has Nigeria’s government built. How many houses has each state of the federation built? They cannot meet the demand and it is not even necessary. What they need to concentrate on is making sure that land is provided for developers – provide land and infrastructure, put your cost there and let people plug into it; then this will give us a leverage. After this, you can now have different categories of houses for different categories of people. If you say you want to provide houses and go ahead to build three bedroom houses, can everybody afford that? No. What happens to studio apartments? What happens to all those small apartments? Young graduates don’t need anything big; they just need something small because they are always mobile. By the time they are married, they move to the next stage. So we need to provide adequate houses that meet the needs of everybody – the young, middle income and high echelon. A lot of people at the lower cadre need houses. Also, you need to see the kind of places people live that they called houses. They don’t have any infrastructure and yet, they call that homes. To correct this, government should make sure that land is provided, making sure that infrastructural facilities are done and everybody has access to them.
How are people going to have access to the houses?
One of the things we have not really taken care of is the issue of mortgage. If we want to ensure that houses are available for everybody, we need to be serious about our mortgage system. We have the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and we don’t even know how many people have access to the mortgage it’s providing. I don’t know what kind of housing unit N15 million can buy now? These are the kind of things they provide and asked people to plug into. We have a lot of works to do, and I think the government has to streamline it and make sure there is a focus for people to follow. If you make mortgage for everybody, then it will be easier for people to have access to adequate housing units.
Let’s look at the issue of high cost of building materials; do you think it’s still possible to provide adequate houses for the people?
Yes. Prices of building materials are looking north and we are not expecting them to look south because of the high level of inflation in the country. If people struggled to get these materials ready, they have to make profits. But how do we solve the problem? One, majority of people in this country are not earning adequate salary; they are only earning money for survival. Until we get to a stage where government is serious and says this is the minimum amount that somebody can live with. You have to put housing and transportation into it before you can arrive at a minimum wage. There must be indices for fixing minimum wage. Even the last minimum wage in the country, some states are yet to pay. If the basic needs of people are not met when fixing minimum wage, government is just joking. We need to address the issue of wages. In other places where they have minimum wages, those minimum wages are really minimum. When they say it is minimum wage, they would look at the society and say even with this, you can live your life comfortably. I am not talking about luxury, but at least, you can be sure you can meet your basic needs. If a man is able to meet his basic needs, he has no problem. The rest will be luxury, but the point now is that, have I met my basic needs? So government needs to come up and see what the reality is today. Government must make adequate provisions in terms of infrastructure and others to enable people to plug into what it wants to do. Government should give people adequate facilities such as transportation, electricity, good roads, water and telecom to thrive. Government, just like in the developed countries, should take care of basic needs of the people in terms of provision of houses such that when you get your work, the minimum wage you earn will help you to survive by feeding and providing accommodation for yourself.
How can the issue of vacant houses be fixed?
That is a challenging issue. Those houses are not just vacant; they are only vacant because their prices are out of the reach of the people. What I think has come to play as regards the vacant houses is the force of demand and supply. These houses we are talking about, how many are they? They are not many.
How can we stop proceeds of fraud and corruption in the real estate sector?
The government has a lot of roles to play in this area. I know in our own firm, the officials of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) came around and said we must register with the Special Control Unit against Money Laundering (SCUML), which we did. This is to say that, if you have any issue or any inflow that is beyond ordinary, they will query it, but I wonder how many of such queries they have done. We don’t have such an inflow. Whether people really have such inflows and have been queried, I don’t know. So what do we do? You see, when people have excess income, they will find a place to invest it. That is natural. I must tell you, the only sustainable investment platform anywhere in the world is real estate.
How do you mean?
If I have money and I know I don’t need the money in a hurry, I take to real estate and invest it there. I am guaranteed my money will not be lost. My money is there for me at any point in time and I have appreciable income on the money. If I put it into stocks, it is a different ball game all together. If I put it into Treasury bill, I have a minimum income there, but I can maximise my income through the real estate. That is why you see virtually everyone in the world, especially rich men, even Dangote and Otedola, all do real estate. Why? This is because real estate is the only platform that sustains wealth. It guarantees that this wealth is here, it is immovable. This house you are in now, I mean this Investment Building on Broad Street, Lagos, has been here for more than 50 years. So WEMABOD that owns the property ought to have got its money again and again. If it is an individual, of course, the idea is that it can also be inherited after I have gone. So that is why people want to put money there.
So how do you guard against people bringing ill-gotten wealth to it?
The government through the EFCC has to work a lot. When you have an income like I said, and the money is with you, and you just got sudden wealth and you want to tie it down, it has to pass through a system. What does that system talk about, you don’t query it. Does the bank actually flash the income in? Or if you are seeing my income consistently for the past five years and suddenly I brought in N10 billion, there must be a question mark, like sorry Mr. man, where do you get the N10 billion from? I should be queried such that I will show you my books on what I have done to earn the income. I don’t know whether that happens. I am not a banker. This is one of the ways government can curb corruption in the real estate sector.
Yes, you can earn the income legitimately, but also, if it is ill-gotten, the system should capture it and query it. Once it is queried, it will be difficult to get to real estate. But if you get the money now, the next thing is real estate, that’s why you see prices of those houses and lands going north. It will be so once you have so much money pursuing little goods, there will be inflation. That is why you have high market in Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Lekki, because the supply of land is limited and the income is getting higher. Many people are chasing a few supplies. To capture it, government has a lot of things to do and it would need to do it with establishments like banks and other financial institutions so that we can be able to curb ill-gotten wealth in real estate.
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The PDP spokesman recalled how the opposition party had on various occasions alerted that the APC government had ceded sovereignty over a large portion of our country to terrorists, “many of whom were imported into our country by the APC.”
He further stated: “From the video, in a brazen manner, terrorists as non-state actors boldly showed their faces, boasting, admitting and confirming their participation in the Kuje Prison break, some of whom were former prison inmates who were either jailed or awaiting trial for their previous terrorism act against our country.
“Nigerians can equally recall the confession by the Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai that the APC government knows the plans and whereabouts of the terrorists but failed to act.
According to Ologunagba, about 18,000 Nigerians have been killed by terrorists between 2020 and 2022 “as the criminals continue to be emboldened by the failures and obvious complicity of the APC and to which the PDP had always drawn attention.”
“This is not politics; this is about humanity and leadership, which leadership sadly and unfortunately is missing in our country at this time,” he said.
The PDP added that it is appalled by “the lame response by the apparently helpless, clueless and deflated Buhari Presidency, wherein it told an agonizing nation that President Buhari “has done all and even more than what was expected of him as Commander in Chief by way of morale, material and equipment support to the military…”
“This is a direct admission of incapacity and failure by the Buhari Presidency and the APC. At such a time, in other climes, the President directly leads the charge and takes drastic measures to rescue and protect his citizens.
“In time of adversity, the President transmutes into Consoler-in-Chief to give hope and succour to the citizens. Painfully, Nigeria does not have a President who cares and can stand as Consoler-in-Chief to the citizens.
“It has now become very imperative for Nigerians to take note and realize that the only solution to this unfortunate situation is to hold the APC government accountable. We must come together as a people, irrespective of our political, ethnic and religious affiliations to resist the fascist-leaning tendencies of the APC administration.
Ologunagba called for an urgent meeting of the National Council of State to advise on the way to go over the nation’s worsening insecurity.
“Our nation must not fall. The resilient Nigerian spirit and ‘can-do- attitude’ must be rekindled by all to prevail on the President to immediately and without further delay, accede to the demand by the PDP and other well-meaning Nigerians to convene a special session of the National Council of State to find a lasting solution since the President has, in his own admission, come to his wit’s end,” the PDP spokesman declared.
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