Nigeria’s huge housing deficit estimated to be over 17 million units has been linked to the high cost of building and slow system of construction.

A professor of Estate Management at the University of Lagos, Timothy Nubi, speaking on a television programme, said the Federal Government must take steps to address the issues for the country to reel out of the housing deficit.
Nubi asserted that government needs to tap into the opportunities provided by technology to speed up the level of housing construction in the country. He  stressed the need for houses to be built in large number and that efforts should be made to reduce cost of building and time of construction.

“We can’t get anywhere with the gradualism, incremental and progressive approach that takes 21 years to build a house. Cost of construction, labour input out of it, is almost 40 percent and when you keep labour in the field for almost a year in building, you are incurring cost. There are modern methods of construction, it has been industrialised such that construction time on site has been reduced to two  weeks,” he said.

The professor said Nigeria had identified its housing problem but had failed to resolve the problems years after. “The government agrees that we have 17 million housing-unit deficit and we are celebrating 1,300 units.