The Executive Director, Housing Development Advocacy Network, Festus Adebayo, said an ongoing survey by the network has revealed that over 5000 developed houses are unoccupied in Bauchi and Jigawa State.
He disclosed this while speaking on the panel session of the 3rd Annual Wemabod Real Estate Outlook, held at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, recently.
He said, “I am on an assignment from one state to another state. What I am doing now is that I am looking for houses that have been completed but no one is occupying. Between Bauchi and Jigawa, we are having over 5000 houses being developed. I would not like to mention the name of the organisation doing these developments; it is a Federal Government agency, and the houses are not being occupied. This is research being done by the Housing Advocacy Development Network, and maybe at the end of the report, we will know why the houses have been completed but unoccupied.
“One of the biggest challenges of real estate in Nigeria is access to land; give my driver a piece of land, give him papers on that land; he will build one bedroom for himself. Getting a Certificate of Occupancy at Alausa is not a ticket for land grabbers to allow you to take over the land.
“I would like to use this opportunity to call on the Federal Government in Nigeria to look into this issue of access to land, as there is lots of corruption involved. Go to Abuja, and you will know what is going on based on land racketeering and land grabbing. The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, in December, demolished about 100 units of houses under the allegation that those houses were grabbed, that they were not formally allocated to them.”
Corroborating the above, the Group Managing Director of Odu’a Investment Company Limited, Abdulrahman Yinusa, said the first thing is to not only take censors but to begin to engage the owners of those properties and find out why these buildings are unoccupied.
He said, “In other countries, the government sometimes will purchase a large number of houses for people who cannot afford it and pay. If this can be implemented in Nigeria, people cannot be homeless and there are empty homes; this shows a disconnection somewhere, so let us find out who they are and extend incentives to them; if it does not work, fines should be meted out if completed houses remain unoccupied.”
Meanwhile, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Wemabod Limited, Bashir Oladunni, said it was not in the amount or price of houses but in the ease of the payment system.
He added, “There is no affordable cement, no affordable building materials, so we all face the open market to get the building materials at high cost, unless the government wants to subsist. We should, however, just focus on having a flexible payment model that would favour both the developers and the consumers.”
In an earlier report, the Housing Development Advocacy Network said it had commenced the compilation of unoccupied housing projects across various states in Nigeria, with the presentation of all identified projects expected to be made available within four months.
