By Maduka Nweke
Housing deficit cannot stop in Nigeria at least if government fails to change the housing regulations and policies in the country. Nigeria for the time being is not suffering from lack of housing to accommodate the citizenry, instead what it is suffering is the political will to enforce and implement the policies that regulate the sector.
To say the least, the 17 million housing deficit brandished by some experts could have been demeaned by the number of vacant and unoccupied estates lying idle in major cities of the country. Also a lot of people left their states, towns, villages and homes empty while coming to the city to look for accommodation. This would not be so had government created opportunities in those areas to discourage people from leaving their state for the cities.
Again, there are a lot of estates built by some nevoux rich Nigerians who do not bother even if the buildings remain unoccupied for decades. These set of people do not know the definition of recession as what they and their families’ needs for the next five decades have been secured. To these set of people, those who are writing or crying about housing deficits are not facing realities of life.
Going by available statistics, Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, alone accounts for 10 per cent of the 17 million housing deficit in the country. The situation persists despite the fact that many mansions dot the landscape of the territory uninhabited. The houses, which have been completed but remain unoccupied, are scattered across some districts with many of which are located in private housing estates.
Indeed there are a number of issues and insinuations associated with the empty buildings. One of such is that the owners could have embezzled public funds and laundered them on acquisition of properties. Other insinuations associated with the unoccupied buildings are that some of the owners kept cash in them to evade moving stolen funds through banks and that the buildings are owned by some past and current public office holders who did not have real needs for such properties but had to acquire them using looted funds.
One of the most surprising areas of this development is that most Nigerians living in the FCT and environs have no access to decent accommodation. Worse, a rising number of completed estates in the capital city and across the country are presently unoccupied and more have been taken over by miscreants.
Research into estates in high-brow areas in Abuja like Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse II and a number of others in the capital city, revealed that most of the well completed houses remained unoccupied years after their completion, due to the high cost of renting or leasing of such property. Also in Apo, Dei Dei, Gwarimpa, lugbe, Wuse, Gwarimpa , Gudu, life camp and Katampe, the unoccupied houses owned by the society’s most influential and wealthy have been converted into safe houses for the storage of their loot and venues for laundering money, in order to keep away sniffing anti-graft agencies.
Strangely, some of these housing units are leased out by the gatemen to desperate house seekers, in order to make some money by the side. Who can blame them, when the owners of some of these building have not visited the area for more than seven years and, as a result, know very little about the state of their property.
A four-bedroom bungalow in Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse and Garki goes for between N3m and N5m a year, while those who wish to occupy the same type of apartments in satellite towns like Gwarinpa, Kubwa, Lugbe and Karu, among others, must cough out between N800, 000 and N1.5 millions in some estates.There are many dimensions to the issue of unoccupied estates in Abuja. Some of them are built not to be occupied, because they were used for money laundering; the owners did not have the opportunity of taking the money to the bank, because they can be apprehended.
The only option for these people who apparently have looted the public treasury is to use the money and invest in property that even if they are not occupied for years they are not worried. You know that the value of houses are always going up, it appreciates, so they are not bordered about the houses been empty. Another prong of the issue is the category of those who built the estates to look for buyers, but cannot get buyers.
They cannot get buyers apparently because the houses are not affordable; obviously, the purchasing power has gone down. When a two-bedroom apartment is put at N14 million, how can it be affordable, and even when you are asked to pay 20 per cent or 30 per cent of the amount, it is still not easy for many people to afford.
I think the government should do something about the cost of building materials, which is affecting the cost of building, the cost of acquiring land and the cost of processing land title documents should also be checked. I can tell you that if government does that, the cost placed on housing in Abuja will definitely be forced down. I am seeing serious danger in Abuja.
The danger is this; these too many houses that are standing without buyers due to lack of purchasing power, the prices of houses may crash. According to simple law of economics, when the supply is high and demand is low, prices will be forced to crash. Some of the owners of those estates that are not being occupied got the money from somewhere.