Housing deficit challenge facing developing countries and REDAN

Shelter is a basic need of a man on earth. In the life of every human being, both in the developed and underdeveloped societies of the world, a shelter or a house is a place for protection from exposures to danger, environmental protection from adverse weather conditions, and a temporary or permanent place to rest or sleep to receive strength, after the day’s work, and get the body and soul refreshed again. Man as a social animal, over so many centuries (dating back to the Stone Age), has experienced numerous protective challenges, life threatening encounters, and diverse forms of accommodation problems as a result of homelessness. This, under any unimaginable situation or unthinkable expectation, should not in any form have been man’s bargain — to be homeless in his daily life and sojourn on the planet earth. This basic need, therefore, is among the three (the others are food and clothing), that sustain man’s existence and survival.

Over the ages, human beings have lived and have continuously transformed their living standards to suit their times and generations. This particular aspect of man’s performance has social, economic and environmental dimensions with trending generational implications. Human taste and technology have lately been playing very significant roles in the course of man’s choice for livable homes and accommodations in modern society. Of course, the evolutionary trend in the choice of putting shelter over man’s head in the form of his place of abode, is constantly determined by the economic circumstances of the individuals (especially in recent times). This particular issue has always determined the social class of human beings, either as rich or poor. It is a generational socio-economic issue that is always assessed or classified by the level of one’s economic earning capacity at any given period in every generation. This is also playing a very pronounced and critical role in the assessment of how wealthy or poor any economy or nation is, when it is compared in the comity of nations. Housing projects and their beauty from an aerial view (the aesthetics and the neighbourhood beauty, better still, its sights and sounds) speak volumes about any economy or nation in this present age.

There is no doubt that accommodation challenges or housing deficit issues in a society are, generally, in perfect alignment with poverty, hence this discourse on housing deficit in the poorer nations of the world. In Africa, inadequate provision of houses for an increasingly growing population in the urban cities present a very disturbing social challenge that manifest in all forms of social disorder, ranging from insecurity, violence, robbery, and breeding all forms of lawlessness, from slums (where human beings merely exist, dehumanised and living like animals), to a disorganised social order in the running of the daily governance of any affected community by local authorities because, the health and environmental mess that is observed is little or less uncontrollable by the existing social order. The government is therefore admonished to significantly promote policies and initiatives that encourage investors from the private sector to partner and develop housing schemes that are affordable for the lower class in the society, so that order could be entrenched in the governance and daily administrative controls (with rules and regulations) of human beings living in various residential neighbourhoods.

Most developing countries (using Africa, for instance) are synonymous with the world’s poorer economies. They are therefore faced with huge physical underdevelopment in terms of housing projects. This is why concerted efforts are needed from development partners and real estate investors in the housing industry. Nations that cannot afford such investments to provide comfortable and livable modern housing units could go the route of attracting both local and foreign investors in the industry for provision of homes to the citizenry. Such arrangement could be done by public private partnership (PPP) or by build operate and transfer (BOT) contract arrangement. The essence of all these ideas and initiatives is for a government to run a high performance driven administration, where the citizenry are provided with befitting social facilities (in this case, affordable housing) that they could take up through mortgage from corresponding banks that are in the loop.

In Nigeria, the organised real estate sector, the umbrella association that is known as the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN, established in 2001, and currently under the leadership of Akintoye Adeoye as president, is doing a lot for the country towards solving the problem of housing deficit within the economy. It has a laudable initiative that is a robust arrangement, where REDAN is reaching out to the entire 36 states of the federation with construction projects of over 2,000 housing units to be built in each state known as “REDAN communities/cities”. This is essentially to provide affordable modern housing for the lower cadre of civil servants through mortgage, while they are in active service, to have their own homes that they will fall back on at retirement. The states are therefore urged to embrace this REDAN initiative by making lands available without hesitation to all REDAN chapters in their respective states, towards actualising this laudable dream housing initiative that shall drastically reduce housing deficit challenge within the economy and contribute towards national socio-economic development.

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