Why past housing interventions failed —Atebije

Tpl Nathaniel Atebije, is the immediate Past President, Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP). In this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI, he shed more light on the role of each profession in the built environment on the management of Nigeria’s waterway and coastal areas. He also speaks about the importance of planning to the attainment of sustainable development.

There has been a controversy concerning the management of the nation’s coastaline by the office of the Surveyor -General of the Federation. Who is supposed to manage the developments along the  waterway and coastal areas?

 In public service, we have procedures. In a ministry where you have professionals in the built environment, each of the professional groups have their schedules according to their professions.It is the duty of the surveyor to go and generate information about the quantity of space that has been given, but that has been desired to be planned. It is the job of the town planners to design the layout of the place. Of course, it’s also the job of the surveyors to demarcate boundaries.

It is then passed over to land administration’s department so that they can administer in terms of allocation. Although the Land Use Act specified that there will be a Land Use Allocation Committee at each of the levels to do that administration. It is also the duty of the planning department to issue Development Permit. When these things are to be done, it is to be coordinated. Naturally, it is the planning department that determines which development is legal or illegal, because they are the ones that grant development permit. No planning department grants development permit without hearing from the other counterparts, whether it’s the right development in the right place within the confines of the boundaries.

But now, it appears as if the Office of the Surveyor-General has assumed a larger than life status, as if all the other practitioners in the built environment are under them. No!  It is not like that, and  I think that is what is actually creating the confusion. I think maybe, the people in government might even be whipping up these issues so that there could be some levels of confusion and then have their way and what they want it to be. That is why our development continue to roll in confusion.

There is a paradigm we called modelling-through in planning. This is not really good for us. Let the government follows procedures and allows each person to perform his own duty for us to be seen as being coordinated and being organised. In such a case, let’s go back to the trenches.

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If the minister also is the coordinating leader, he should call all the professionals together to take a decision on how to approach issues, and not for one to begin to issue directives like a military ruler. From what we are seeing now, it appears as if the Surveyor- General of the Federation has become a military ruler. This  is not good for us. We have always been seeing that there is a generation that is coming after us. We have a decision in our field to say that some professionals can bury the mistake. If there are some professionals, when they make mistake on their clients, they may be buried and they are forgotten forever. But the mistake of those of us in the built environment will stare at us while we are alive and the generations yet to come will still come and see the mistakes we made. So why not let us avoid the mistakes  by looking coordinated, by acting in a coordinated manner.

What is NITP doing to correct this identified anomaly?

Definitely, the institute is not sleeping on it. I think the National President is already working on it in order to make a presentation to the powers that be.  Actually, for years, it is without due respect, the selfishness of Nigerians, irrespective of the professions they belong to because there is always a coordinating force, a coordinating person for all the professions.

If you look at it, we have the Accountant-General of the Federation; we have the Auditor- General of the Federation; and we have the Solicitor-General of the Federation, these are the people that have the overall scope of activities.

We have been on it for the past seven years or more, talking to government that, look, you need to create the Office of the Town Planner- General of the federation,  so that all planning activities will be coordinated.

If we had town planner-general of the federation, we wouldn’t be having somebody who is in  allied profession dictating issues that relate to planning.

Now they have moved the Office of the Surveyor – General to the Presidency. To some extent, they can act without recourse to any advice from the Minister for Housing and Urban Development, where this office is supposed to be domiciled.

Just like I said, we have been on it and we have been appealing to government that these things should be done properly so that we can have good  and healthy development.  Everytime, we are all signatories to serious international discussions, paths and treaties, but we just signed it, we don’t work with it. That is the challenge we have.

We have all manners of agreements on sustainable development. What we are talking about is part of the ingredients of sustainable development, but behold, when we sign it, we are going to keep it in the shelf. Nobody wants to work with it.

How should Nigeria organise its waterways and coastal areas for sustainable development?

There is always a provision for planning but unfortunately, the politicians we have only think about four years. They are not thinking about the things that will stay beyond them. They are looking for things they will do today. We have been appealing to government at all levels. We had a Nigerian Urban and Regional Planning Law, which was a Decree in 1992 and became an act of parliament in 2004. This  has made provisions for planning at all levels. At the federal government’s level, it has not even been complied with. For example, we are supposed to have the Office of the National Fiscal Planning Commission, the National Urban and Regional Development Commission, up till today, it has not been done. We have made appeals to government.  In fact, in several meetings of the National Council on Lands, Housing and Urban Development, we have reminded government on this matter It would be approved at the council, but implementation has been a problem.

The other time we made this appeal, it was approved at the council, and we took it back to the minister then, the next thing we heard was that government was thinking of reducing the number of offices. So it was not a time to create a new one. While we were given this picture, the next thing that we saw government doing was to create the Ministry for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Affairs. So who is fooling who? If we do not want to create a national office that will coordinate planning, and we do not want to establish a ministry that will handle physical planning matters, all we are telling ourselves is that we are ready for disaster. Of course, having the Ministry for Disaster Management is like a security route because Nigeria is a disaster zone.

Nobody is looking safe anywhere, and so we are all elements of disaster.

It’s just because we are not ready to plan. Planning helps us to unveil the ungoverned areas. And they will be able to put in strategies that will make sure that they are governed by putting appropriate land uses, putting appropriate systems that will make sure that these places are well utilised and safe.

These are the problems we have: The coastal areas along the waterlines, like we have seen,  are supposed to be planned. And you know that planning is more or less a public service.A good proportion of planning of physical planning is supposed to be social service to the people, which requires government intervention. But many of them think that it is costly to plan, and not knowing that it is more costly not to plan.

What can you say about the Renewed Housing Estate Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu? Do you think it is affordable for the workers?

The job at the federal level is to generate policies, but we want to be in policies and at the same time in implementation.

For God’s sake, the things that people are doing do not answer the question. Well, the private sector may also have their own challenges in terms of the production of these houses and the cost.

We have discussed at various fora how we can make housing more affordable and more accessible to Nigerians,  especially the low-income group. In fact, there is nobody, low and middle income groups in Nigeria today that can actually afford building a house that is comfortable for himself. In some places, some of the things that we advocated is that by government policy, we can give land at concessionary costs to the developers.

Cost of land is a great ingredient in the cost of the houses they are building. These are the challenges. Let me say one other very sad thing is that many of these places where they are building renewed hope houses, I’m not sure of places where they have got planning approval.

The one in Abuja, there was no planning approval. Why should government disobey its own laws? Except for now,at the inception of the Renewed Hope buildings in Abuja,  there was no approval.

I tried to find out from the ministry itself and they said even the planning department was not aware until the day of the launch. I asked from the Development Control Department of FCT, that is supposed to grant development permit for such a project. Nothing was done.

What is the implication of this?

If you hit it on the face, it means that even the buildings they are doing are illegal structures. That is the reason that, by demolishing houses all around the town, even if the houses are structurally stable, the fact that you didn’t follow the rule of law, you didn’t follow the planning process to get development permits, means that what you are doing is illegal. It’s illegal.

Well, they say government is the one formulating the law and they interpret it the way they want. But for God’s sake, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Do you think there is operational mortgage facilities in Nigeria to be accessed for home ownership?

We have had things like the Federal Mortgage Bank, that is giving loans at single digits. I think it’s between eight to nine percent, which is okay But again, sometimes when they give to the primary mortgage agencies, the mortgage administrators heighten the interest rate, which makes it a bit difficult.

Also, when you think about getting money from the National Housing Fund, even for civil servants, what you get from it is peanut. You know, considering how much you have put in because they give you a percentage of whatsoever you put in. So the mortgage facilities are there, but at the end of the day, it is still at a very high cost for anybody who wants to make use of it.

Well, recently they brought in the MRIF, which is also another intervention. But the problem is accessing some of these things is herculean because some of the things that you are requested to produce

What’s your advice to the government concerning the housing sector in Nigeria?

For the housing sector, we have seen that housing interventions in the past failed because there was no good planning component.

Taking it back to the days of Shagari regime, many of the houses were built in places that were inconvenient for anybody to go and live. At the end of the day, they became places for rats and  rodents. So if government is thinking of a functional housing, they should start with a plan.

It should be well thought out. It is not just the architectural design that gives you a house. If a house is not properly placed, it will not meet the needs of the people.

So, let it be that planning is the first thing to do in any environment that is going to be functional. And if that is the case, Nigeria should imbibe the culture of planning for anything that has to be done. We should know that the land we have is very finite. The land is reducing every day and the population is increasing rapidly. We are even losing land.

We had Bakkasi as part of us before, but Cameroon has taken it back. Quite a lot of places have been taken by flooding and other climatic conditions that are not very favourable. So we are losing a lot of the space we need for useful development.Therefore, we must think better and plan our land so that we are not going to have crisis and anarchy in the years to come.