| Summary: | Despite replacing the government’s direct provision of housing with an enabled
private-driven approach for over three decades, the housing deficit in Nigeria has
continued to increase to a figure estimated to be between 17 million and 22 million
units. Abuja, the Federal Capital of Nigeria alone accounts for 10% of this deficit
despite the significant number of unoccupied houses in the city. This research
investigated the reason behind this failure and proposed recommendations to address
the issue. The data for this research was collected using multiple qualitative methods
– phenomenology, case study, and workshop in a Generic Qualitative Inquiry (GQI)
approach; thus, semi-structured interviews were administered in two stages to 13
participants comprising public and private stakeholders in the housing sector to
characterise the problem and define the solutions. Structured questions were
presented to another 18 participants for discussion in a workshop, and semi-structured
interviews were administered to the case study project participants (the MFF and 11
residents of its estates). The research revealed that the persistent housing deficit is
due to low investment in and poor access to affordable housing. It shows that poor
operational framework, which manifests in poor funding of agencies charged with
enabling the private-driven affordable housing is responsible for its poor performance.
Therefore, the factors affecting the performance of private-driven affordable housing
include administrative bottlenecks in facilitating the availability and registration of
serviced land for developers, land speculation encouraged by poor funding of
agencies and resulting in commercialised public land allocation, high transaction cost
and registration of land resulting in poor choice of location for affordable housing to
reduce cost, the Land Use Act (LUA) limitation of the powers of Federal government
on land, which affects the spread of affordable housing efforts across the country, poor
and delayed approval of loan arising from delay in processing and securing approval
of land registration, poor access to NHF mortgages due to low income resulting in poor
demand capacity, low investment in, and wrong conceptualisation of affordable
housing to the detriment of end user housing need. These findings indicate the need
for a decentralised housing system to maximise state and local government powers
on land to facilitate affordable land for housing and for meeting end user housing
needs, which vary across the country.
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