By Emmanuel Elebeke

The Minister of Communication Technology and Supervising Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Mrs.  Omobola Johnson says Nigeria requires about N59.7 trillion to bridge the yawning gap of some 17 million units of housing deficit in the country.

The Minister stated this, at the official opening of the 2014 National Building and Road Research Institute, NIBRI Housing summit in Abuja.

Dr. Johnson, noted that the said amount was needed to provide affordable housing in the country,  given that Nigeria with a population of 170 million requires at least additional 820,000 housing units per annum, based on an estimation of nine dwelling units a year per 1000 population  to meet  the rising demands and replenishing decaying stock.

She lamented the high influx of rural dwellers into urban and semi-urban cities from the rural areas, which she said had given rise to a heightened urbanisation growth rate in Nigeria, currently put at 5.8 per cent per annum and adjudged as one of the highest globally.

“The quest for greener pasture has constituted a major problem or cause of escalating deficits in the housing sub-sector. This is because our urban centres are inundated by an influx of job seeking rural-dwellers who end up living in squalor sjust to make ends meet,” said the Minister.

For this reason, she pointed out that the urban and semi-urban infrastructure has been over-stretched, turning some of the settlements into squalors and unkempt neighbourhoods.

“We must explore avenues of alleviating this acute housing shortage in addition to the fact that housing is another integral component of the critical infrastructure to accelerate economic development and forms of a substantial part of the GDP of most developed countries.
The theme of the summit is: Achieving Affordable Housing in Nigeria.

The Minister said the topic was appropriate and timely, since housing the Nigerian population is increasingly becoming a challenge.
She said the need for affordable and equitable housing, much as it can never be overemphasised, has become difficult to meet for various reasons ranging from: economic to social; cultural  among others, adding that the need for housing is a general and global human needs for shelter.

According to her, meeting housing needs in Nigeria is bedevilled by economic constraints in the sense that building and construction is a financially intensive endeavour with most Nigerians lacking the capacity to embark on building construction and finish within their basic means of income.

“This is the primary reason why most housing schemes hitherto embarked upon by government failed to see the light of the day. It is essentially because most Nigerians did not qualify for various financial and mortgage options available in the system,” she added.

She also pointed out that the sourcing and deploying of materials for buildings, where the land to build is available, acquiring tenure is often a challenge for individuals.
She tasked NIBRI to explore measures to alleviate what she termed acute housing shortage, describing housing as an integral component of the critical infrastructure to accelerate economic development.

In her own remarks, the Minister of lands, Housing and Urban Development, Mrs. Akon Ayakenyi, said the theme of the summit was apt and in line with the Transformation Agenda of the present administration, geared towards achieving the objectives of the national vision 20:2020, which seeks to place Nigeria among the top 20 economies of the world in terms of growth in much GDP by the year 2020.

She said inadequate infrastructure has continued to militate against the realisation of the federal government’s objective.