We need to urgently conduct an inventory of houses we have —Ayinde

TPL Olutoyin Ayinde, a former President of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners, is the second Vice President, Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN). In this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI, the astute professional spoke on best ways to engage people living in flood-prone locations for immediate action; the need for full implementation of Ibeju-Lekki Master Plan; and major take-home from the 2025 Abuja International Housing Show.

Government has asked people living in low-lying location to relocate due to flooding. This has been the situation yearly. Do you think this is proper without any alternative accommodation for the affected persons?

These people are living in flood-prone locations. Where they are being asked to relocate from have somehow become permanent residences of people, but you will observe that those areas are low-lying and you don’t ordinarily build in low-lying areas without taking the necessary precautions.

One of the precautions is that there is a plan for that area. So, most of the areas we find people living in are not planned areas.

These areas are actually due for urban regeneration. For those places to be reconstructed, upgraded, you know, their heights need to be increased so that they can become higher than the level of drainage. You find that in most of these places, drains are not even moving because it’s in a low-lying area.

It’s not that a permanent solution cannot be sought but a permanent solution cannot be immediate.

Secondly,, it cannot be immediate and then, it must have the buy-in of the people.

You know, government is hesitant to do immediate slum clearance. If government says it wants to upgrade the place,  before you know it, the civil societies are up against the authority, saying they are displacing people and things like that. So government itself is being careful.

So to be able to do it, the people must accept that they are living in an area that is not sustainable and therefore,  they must be willing to leave the place for government to do the upgrading.

I want to believe that it’s not that people are not ready to leave, it’s that they don’t even trust the government because they know that immediately such a location is taken away from them. They won’t be able to access the location thereafter. It will be sold to the rich just like what happened in Maroko decades ago. Don’t you think their fear is justifiable?

 In most cases, you will find that those occupying these areas don’t really have approval to their occupation. It’s a complex situation.

So when you don’t have approval to occupation and you are somewhere over the years, you know, you have this sense of entitlement, sense of ownership. But truth be told, I think things need to be done well. If you say you don’t trust government, you would rather jeopardise your own safety by staying in that place forever.

So, I think there’s a need for dialogue, and not just to keep on saying you don’t trust the government. Okay, you don’t trust the government, it means that you are willing to live in that situation perpetually. When that happens, you still want government to come and take charge during flooding.

I don’t see how the two agree. So we must come to an understanding that government itself must build trust. And if we don’t try something, we cannot say this is the result. So there must be a way to meet, there must be a point between the people and the government, you know, maybe in form of  Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) that can be enforced to see that when people move away from a place, they can come back. But there also must be some other conditions attached to that MOU because when government is making the place now buildable, more sustainable, don’t forget that costs are being invested. So people shouldn’t come back and live free, forgetting that an investment has to be recovered. They too must be willing to start paying some development levy, which they couldn’t have paid in bulk at once. But government is doing that investment and they can over the years begin to pay back. That’s the way real estate development works.

Ibeju-Lekki corridor seems to have become purely industrial zone. Don’t you see any residential estate coming to that space as a nuisance?

No, I do not agree.

I think it’s mixed use. I think it’s mixed use because presently, I’m aware that some planning firms are preparing master plans in that area. Review of Lekki Master Plan is being done; review of Ibeju-Lekki Modern City Plan is being done; and I’m aware that it’s a mix of both residential and industrial. There’s the industrial area and there’s the residential area. Even right now, some of those real estate developers have established their strongholds in some of those communities that we have visited. So I believe that if the plan is followed, it will be a mix of both industrial and residential. You need some levels of industrial to generate income, to generate employment for the sustainability of that area.

Going by the huge volume of activities, trucks and traffic in Ibeju-Lekki, hope it won’t become another Apapa.

 Well, it’s up to government to be able to maintain the infrastructure. Secondly, what makes Apapa difficult is the fact that there are no alternative routes. So in the master plan, there are proposals for the 5th Mainland Bridge and the 6th Mainland Bridge such that vehicles bearing or carrying petroleum products don’t even have to come into the city of Lagos anymore. They just go out through the Benin-Ore Expressway.

So it’s about government being able to implement the plan. If the plan is implemented fully, and also there’s an investment in pipeline transportation, there won’t be gridlock.

Oil, over the world, is best transported by pipelines. So if the government does all of that, we shouldn’t have the situation of Apapa.

What is your take-home from the just concluded Abuja International Housing Show?

Well, the focus of the housing show is the advocacy for affordability—affordable housing. And it’s going to take a lot of reviewing our culture, our attitude to housing, because housing in our culture is territorial.

How do you mean?

Yeah, everybody sees a house as his own territory—land, a compound and things like that.  What people really need is an apartment to live. And that necessarily does not mean you own a compound. You can have a block of flat that has 100 units. That means you have to provide it for 100 people, not 100 lands for 100 people. One of the things that makes housing expensive is also the land. Where is the land? In Lagos, for example, where is the land?  And to the rest of Nigeria because the land we think we have by spreading or by sprawling is the land that should go for agriculture and other uses. And by encroaching on that, we are also inducing agricultural food insecurity. So everything has to be planned. We can’t begin to encroach on land that is meant for agriculture or other parts of the ecological system.

Someone spoke about the need for mortgage banks to recapitalise. Do you agree with this?

I’m not a finance person, but if our mortgage banks need to do that, so that they can make mortgages available to people, then so be it. Right now, people are not getting the mortgage. So if that has to be done, then it has to be.

Cost of two two-bedroom in Lagos for example is between N45 million – N60 million. How can the urban dwellers be housed?

 I would suggest that we need to urgently conduct an inventory of what we have. For example, how many dwelling units do we have in vacancy? How many structures are not residential but are vacant and can be retrofitted for housing purposes? What is the demand that we have for now? What are the types of units in demand. Most of the young population need only studio apartments, and not the three-bedroom luxury apartments being constructed all over the place. There’s a lot of dynamics that this involves.

Let’s look at the ease of doing business. Which area do we need an improvement to create ease of doing real estate business in Nigeria?

In terms of ease of doing business, rule of law needs to prevail, professional integrity must be upheld and value of life must be rated above revenue generation capacity at the expense of sustainable development.

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