‘Several residents clinging on to life in FCT villages, satellite towns…’
The scarcity of affordable housing in Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is silently forcing a larger number of people into housing insecurity and the crisis if unchecked by the government will continue to increase the growth of slums and squatter homes which may trigger serious environmental issues in the FCT.
While there are lots of massive estates sprawling in the FCT for the super-rich; housing plans directed at bridging the gap between the haves and have not is in dire supply. Driving through Abuja’s city, it is a common sight to see thousands of unoccupied buildings spread all over the town, particularly in highbrow areas. Yet! The majority of Abuja residents still find it extremely difficult to rent an apartment.
This troubling housing deficit has pushed up rents as well as the prices of homes and the trend has forced many low income earners in Abuja to settle for a substandard lifestyle in villages located within the cities; satellite towns with almost zero social amenities while several others survive by living in distant neighbourhoods, where they face poorer prospects of finding work; risk their health and safety as access to clean water among other basic social needs is near zero in such conditions.
TheNewsGuru (TNG) visited some of the villages and satellite towns to understudy the plights of those who live in the aforesaid communities and their tales were really disturbing.
According to some of the residents who spoke with TNG, living in Abuja has been a hellish experience for them, as the lack of access to affordable housing and infrastructure continues to stunt their economic growth.
Mr. Uche Nwafor, a resident of Durumi Village, located around Area 1, Abuja said he has been managing to live in the area because he cannot afford the high rents in the cities, stressing that the area is totally neglected by the government.
“I pay N200, 000 for a room and parlour yearly and there is no water; poor electricity supply and our roads are bad despite the fact that we have approached the council severally on the need to get it rehabilitated to ease movement. The entire neighbourhood is always flooded when it rains and we find it difficult to use the road during the rainy season.
We are appealing to the authorities to come to our aid, they should provide electricity and get the roads rehabilitated to ease our sufferings.”
Expressing her feelings, Rebecca Odok, who stays in Wumba Village, Abuja said, she spends over two thousand Naira monthly to supply herself water.
“ Though rent is cheap here, it is really frustrating and tough for anyone to survive here. This place is a ghetto; no respect for human lives, bad roads, no access to water. You need to come here in the rainy season and see the real shame we face.” she noted.
Meanwhile, One Mr. Tunde (refuses to disclose surname), a staff of the Ministry of Works, said his salary is about N70, 000 per month and the only option he was left with was to secure accommodation in Mararaba at the rate of N 150,000, for a bedroom flat.
“Despite getting low rent in Mararaba, I can tell you that most of my earnings go to transportation. In fact, I fall asleep everytime I get to work, the stress is much. I spend more than an hour waiting for a bus in the morning, even when we eventually get a bus, what about traffic? the truth is just that our government doesn’t care about us”.
Mararaba is one of the slums in the outskirts of Nasarawa state bordering the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.
Similarly, Sunday Okoh, who also resides in Mararaba also affirmed that he travels about one hour to get a vehicle, at the bus stop.
“My office is in the Central Business District in Abuja, but because I can’t afford to get accommodation in the city, I moved to Mararaba, where rent is cheaper.
“Some of us leave our offices by 3pm instead of 4pm in order to avoid the hold-up in the evenings and increment in transportation fare”
He added that the income gap between the rich and the poor is widening every day. The truth of the matter is that many people migrate every day in large numbers to settle in places like Mararaba, Suleja and other slums due to high cost of living and this has aggravated traffic congestion on the road”.
In Karu, one of the satellite towns visited, a resident of the area, Jerry Okike, lamented the lack of basic social amenities in the area.
“Our problems here are many. We have no good road, clean water nor a steady power supply. If it rains, the road becomes a mess and when it dries, you become covered with dust when you pass; it seems the government doesn’t know if we exist” He said.
Although the current administration has invested so much in the housing sector, also partnering with the private sector to reduce the housing deficit in the country and ultimately cut the cost of rent, stakeholders have opined that a lot still needs to be done to get things right.
Speaking on the housing shortage incident, an estate developer, Kayode Agunbiade, said Abuja government policies centred on affordable housing are not active because of the vested interest of politicians.
“There’s no active government policy for the advancement of construction of low-cost apartments for low-income earners. For the one they have designed, it is either poorly implemented or abandoned.
“Instead of building affordable houses in places like Jabi, Karimo, Karu and Nyanya, where illegal buildings were demolished years back, those in power shared the plots among themselves.” He lamented.
However, the views of Lawal Aliyu Magaji, the Managing Director of Abuja Property Development Company (APDC), is positive.
He recently said the present government has been involved in some projects in the FCT to curb the menace of housing deficit in the FCT.
His words, “Currently, we are building on a 50 hectares’ land in Kubwa expressway, residential buildings and some commercial buildings as well. Right now, in that estate, we have over 200 families that have moved into the estate and we are still building. We will commission our first 300 units and before the year runs out we are going to complete another 200 units. We are right now going into phase two, which we started this month and the target is that we are going to build about 500 units in phase two.
Then, we have some other projects like the residential project that is coming up in Kasana district and we have about five hectares of land there. We have another one behind Life Camp, which is about 3.2 hectares, all residential and within this year we are definitely going to start those projects in addition to other commercial properties that we are doing. Also being a government-owned company, we are not only profit-oriented, but we also see ourselves as rendering services.”
He added that part of the problem is the issue of unoccupied building in Abuja. “You can’t have a property and decide to just lock up, some of these properties are not even for sale or rent. Some people just build and lock up those houses. If the government wants to really do what is necessary, the government should invoke all the extant laws and then the issue of tax as well. Those houses have to be paying those taxes, so somebody will not build a house, lock it up and not continue to pay tax.
Another thing is some of those structures are under investigation, some have court cases, litigation and so on. The government needs to come out and do something about that. Once a property is under investigation, it should be assigned either to AMCON or any other arm of government that will be managing that property pending when that decision is taken. So, when a decision is taken, whatever amount of money that was realised during that process, or if the court decides that the owner of the property has not infringed on the law, then the money is his own and it’s transferred back to him.”
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