The shelter crises
You do not need to look into the statistics to accept that there is a crying housing deficit in our country. Just peer into under bridges as well as uncompleted and abandoned buildings in our major towns and cities - and you come face to face with the inescapable truth. Millions of our compatriots, without shelter, are at the mercy of the elements. Life under the bridges and uncompleted buildings is harsh and brutal.
The experts say we are 70 million housing units short in nation-wide demand for housing. In real terms, nearly half of the 150 or so million Nigerians make do without the benefits of modern housing.This clearly ranks as a scandal. It shows there is a rotten underbelly beneath the gleaming stately individual mansions in our towns and cities.
A decent accommodation, or the possibility of individuals acquiring some, is a pointer to the level of human development in every country. It is difficult not to agree with the experts that we face a housing shortage that is rapidly blooming into a crisis.Perhaps, we need not worry much about the half-sheltered and the unsheltered because they are not a threat to the well-heeled. Human history has no instance of an attempt by the denizens of under bridges and uncompleted buildings to draw public attention to their plight in a peaceful or violent demonstration.
The housing problem is an old story, really. It has been creeping up on us for a long, long time. We would be untruthful to ourselves if we pretend it has suddenly caught us unawares. The housing problem has gotten progressively nastier because a) abandoned or policy summersaults scuttled our numerous attempts to address the problem and b) we never planned for the teeming crowd from our maternity wards.
Housing experts in the second republic put our housing shortage at about 10-15 million. It grew to the current impressive figure because the need keeps rising. President Shehu Shagari, whose political party, the NPN, promised us food and shelter in its manifesto, decided to take on this challenge. He needed no one to persuade him that the denizens of under bridges and uncompleted buildings did not make a good case for how our leaders cared for or treated the struggling poor.
Shagari decided to build a uniform number of low-cost houses in either the state capital or a major town in each state of the federation. They came to be known as the Shagari houses. His target, like that of General Yakubu Gowon who also approached the problem from that perspective, was the low to middle income earner. The Shagari housing policy reconnected with the Gowon housing policy.
The president must have been as shocked as some of us that the so-called band of progressive parties rose in stout opposition to this sensible approach to the problem. The UPN governors even refused to allocate land to the president for the housing estates in their various states. They put politics over and above the simple interests of the people. The late Chief Bola Ige, the then governor of the old Oyo State, led the opposition. So, even he, one of the most brilliant politicians we ever had, submitted to the primitive demands of primitive opposition politics.
Some of these estates were completed and the houses given out to those who won them in a lottery. The estates that were not completed remain uncompleted to this day. No attempts were made by the military administration after the overthrow of Shagari to complete them. A sensible national housing policy succumbed once more to the dictates of military politics. I sometimes wonder if blinkers are part of the dress code of our leaders - military and civilian.
The point here is that it would not be fair to hold your past leaders entirely responsible for the crisis the housing shortage has now assumed in the country. Our history of public housing throws up genuine efforts by our past leaders to ensure that the under bridges as well as uncompleted and abandoned