The magic of home ownership elsewhere!

There never will be enough for everything while the world goes on. The more that is given the more there will be needed.”

In 1926, Winston Churchill made this famous assertion.  This aptly describes the global Housing challenge today.

The deficit in Housing provision to its citizenry is a challenge every country is endemically faced with. While the more advanced countries seem to have working formulas such as mortgage, Refinancing and other projected solutions to bridge Housing deficit, the challenge has assumed an emergency proportion in the under-developed nations of the world.  As a developing nation, Nigerian is battling between the above two scenarios!

Elsewhere in the world, governments at various levels make it a major point in governance to provide affordable Housing for its citizens. In some cases, such provisions are made the responsibility of the state where the deserving citizen is unable to afford such. This is the importance placed on Housing provision in the more developed societies where value is placed on the citizens.

In the last few years of our national history, same can not be said of it. Housing provision is almost squarely the responsibility of the citizens. In some cases where far past administrations made some semblance of effort, such opportunities were promptly hijacked by the few capitalists who moped up the inadequate units made available using their foot-soldiers and cronies and in very ridiculous cases, names that could not be traced to physically living mortals as fronts to corner such to themselves and left the deserving teaming masses walloping in the helpless need of affordable housing. Little wonder though that the minute percentage of the teaming populace who can conveniently afford the prohibitive cost of housing soon arrogate to themselves the status of demigods who at their convenient determine when the night of the helpless tenant falls.

It is common sight that not a mean number of Nigerians live in desecrated habitations devoid of any form of basic comfort suitable for humans.  The prohibitive cost of relative decent housing even as tenants has driven a large number of Nigerians to resort to desperate options to put a roof over their heads even if such options are ramshackle and unsafe abodes barely suitable for human habitation.

It is therefore not puzzling how various panic measures basically of no consequential impact have been hazarded by various administrations as attempt to solve this endemic problem. Like most other effort to tackle other citizenry related problems, these solutions have either been abandoned by successive regimes or ended up without making the meaningful impact on the citizens.

A few years ago, a professional colleague of mine came to the office on a Wednesday morning with his face beaming with an unusual excitement. I curiously asked him what the good news was; knowing very well such expression is not a common place with him. He gladly informed me that his wife, a civil servant in one of the South-west states just won a slot to bid for one of the few Housing units funded by the state where she works. He further notified me that she would be in the appropriate Ministry’s office to commence a formal process of finally realizing their life-long dream of owning a home the next Monday. As a good colleague, I congratulated and wished him the best over such a feat. The events that were to unfold were better imagined than experienced. The first shocker was when the wife came home after the meeting to inform him that over two million naira was required of them as initial deposit for the semi-detached apartment which in the first instance does not make him any better than a glorified tenant.

For a woman whose total take home is less than seven hundred thousand naira yearly, such an amount was a near impossibility mostly when thrown against the avalanche of family responsibilities they are regularly faced with, not to mention the soaring run-away inflation that continually punctures one’s earning capability. As my colleague with his wife made all possible moves to raise this deposit through various sources, a memo came up a few days later that the scheme had been suspended; they were enjoined to await further directives which never came till date. News latter filtered to them that a few powerful politicians and their cronies had actually appropriated the units to themselves using various non-existent names as civil servants as has been the case over the years.

This is how the dream of owning a permanent home to them through such a convenient means was dashed. Unfortunately, my colleague had notified his landlord where he kept a two-bedroom flat as a yearly tenant of his readiness to move out of the rented apartment to his home a few months down the line. In response to this notice, the landlord promptly advertised the apartment and rented the house to another willing tenant who was patiently waiting to take over his new apartment. When the news broke that the dream home was not to be, all effort to retain the rented apartment was rebuffed by the landlord as he already had a better deal from a tenant-in-waiting. As I put together this piece, my colleague had moved his family to a shack devoid of any form of comfort or basic amenities that he had to hastily put together somewhere in the outskirts of Lagos as he could possibly not afford the humongous amount required to rent another apartment in the neighborhood considering the time constraint and paucity of funds. This is just one of so many untoward experiences Nigerians go through in the bid to provide a home for themselves and families.

The ordeals citizens go through in the endless quest for housing need is not just limited to government’s inadequacies or in some cases, outright insincerity on the part of same. Activities of Land grabbers mostly in the South-west states are another major inhibition to realizing housing dreams. A visit to any of the courts in these states will bewilder one with the galaxies of land cases sitting in the courts. Some of these cases rise from the lower courts to the Supreme Court and run for generations. Some times, one wonders if the courts lack the judicial will to adjudicate these matters and give justice to the deserving parties. As one who is legally inclined, I know too well that the will to do justice by the courts is not what is lacking in most cases. It is just that there seem to be something mysterious about land issues and by extension, Home ownership. In extreme cases, very odd methods are employed by parties to settle land scores while the various authorities watch helplessly.

The inadequacy of sufficient protection for land owners and lack of adequate compensations for those who suffer losses are some of the major factors responsible for discouraging the rapid growth of private investment in the Housing sector. I had a rapour with a few individuals who are major players in the Real Estate sub-sector of the Economy; their lamentations were all the same and are heavily deterrent of investment drive. One of them captured his corporate experience thus “…real property can offer more security and, these days, greater upside profit potential. The value of a property never goes to zero. Even if destroyed in some catastrophe, chances are that the insurance reimburses the loss. No reimbursement occurs in the case of a business failure. However, the menace of land-grabbers and our relative helplessness at various law courts are major sources of worry. We will not quit the stage for them!” Is it therefore not metaphorical that a sector that holds so much incentive for investment enjoys so little interest from those with investable capitals? This is the level of helplessness faced by those that dare to venture into it in the face of land-grabbers that have formed powerful cartels with soaring influences that cut across various levels of governments. However endangered this subsector is, some private investors have resolved to hang-on while hoping the investment climate in this so rewarding direction stabilizes someday soon. In our subsequent editions, we are going to profile the deliberate effort some of these private investors in the Real Estate subsectors have brought to bear in proffering lasting solutions in providing affordable housing solutions to the citizens.

Measures put in place by the Central government such as the National Housing Funds and others have yielded very little dividends. Some months past, Organized Labor cried out over their members that had been short-chained through these interventions. Some of them claimed they had been in the waiting list for years why nothing was being done to help them realize their home-ownership dream. The experiences differ from person to person and it looks as if there will never be an end to this tell-tales.

As this inadequacy of this human desire so carefully classified as Need by Economists continuously pose a threat to the human race mostly in the developing nations and the third-world, one can only hope that some day soon, someone somewhere will rise to the occasion and muster the political will to take on this monster head-on.