Fashola Should Recreate Jakande’s Housing Magic –Pastor Bassey James

Pastor Bassey James, who is the senior pastor of the Royal House of faith, Lekki, is one person that is enthu­siastic to see the Jakande’s magic in mass housing re-created. He opines that doing this would create large number of jobs. In this interview, James, who is also chancellor of the Akpabiosm Centre for Leadership Development, Uyo, bares his mind on the socio-economic challenge of Nigeria’s mass housing deficit and other related issues. Read Excerpts below:

The Nigerian nation appears to have been stagnating since May 29, and the year will roll over in 17 days, and many people are unsure of what to expect in 2016. How does that make you feel?

I am very optimistic that God will do the right thing for us a nation. I believe that the hand of God is on this nation. I have faith in God and that is why when people say that there is a casting down, I rather declare that there is a lifting up. That is what bible says and I believe it. We need to allow God to complete the good work He has started in our nation. We should depend on God totally for change and restructuring of our great nation. When a country depends solely on God, it is bound to prosper in God’s own way.

Today we have the former Lagos State governor, Baba­tunde Fashola as the Minister of Works, Power and Hous­ing, three key areas that have enormous potential to create jobs and bring about the change Nigerians desire. What is your opinion on this?

I am so afraid, but I am also happy that Babatunde Fashola is a man Ni­gerians love and respect because of his antecedents in Lagos. But to put three huge ministries under one man, I wonder how he will be sleeping these days. The former Federal Min­istry of Housing alone was big. We have an extremely huge demand for affordable housing. In the last 27 to 30 years, we have not seen a clear in­dication of a housing programme in Nigeria. No new federal government housing estates have been built; there are no state housing estates again. So, we need a very robust and pragmatic approach to housing delivery to Nigerians. From my own experience, garnered from the build­ing of the Akpabiosm Centre in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, housing alone has enormous capacity to generate mil­lions of employment opportunities in Nigeria. If you are building one bun­galow, even in the village, you are bound to employ a minimum of 50 people, either as architects, quantity surveyors and other professionals, masons and daily paid labourers, an electrical contractor and their work­ers; plumbing technicians and their assistants, carpenters, iron benders, painters, furniture builders, floor tilers, among other needed artisans. At the other end of the spectrum, you have suppliers of sand, granite chippings or gravel, cement, paint, electrical cables and fittings, roofing sheets, aluminum profiles, wood, doors, etc. Now imagine a situation where the federal the federal govern­ment is building tens of thousands of new housing units in one state and then this simultaneously repeated in another state.

I would like to see a situation where each state government would build up to 10,000 housing units. With that number of houses under construction, you would be able to create hundreds of employment opportunities.

I want to appeal to President Mu­hammadu Buhari to look critically into this. Let me put this in perspec­tive. There was a time in this country when we had the Lateef Jakande administration in Lagos State, which delivered affordable mass housing. Incidentally, Fashola comes from Lagos State. If the federal govern­ment is really serious about deliver­ing change, I want to see the Buhari administration dust up the Jakande template and use it to deliver mass housing across the country. Alhaji Jakande was able to do that and he created a lot of employment oppor­tunities in the building industry.

The Buhari administration should take up this issue of mass housing development and declare it as a national emergency that must be prosecuted with the Jakande spirit.

He should push every state in Ni­geria to build a minimum of 10,000 housing units. He should turn the goodwill that ushered him into office into fervent support by corporate entities that produce building materi­als. The government can do this by implementing fiscal policies that would encourage these companies to crash the prices of these products needed to deliver mass housing. The multiplier effects would be enor­mous. In fact it would be a tsunami. Imagine a situation where Dangote Cement could make the price of cement drop substantially; a situation where the government would negoti­ate with companies for the lowest prices like Jakande did in Lagos. Then companies handling hous­ing projects would be able to buy materials at the deeply discounted bulk price.

One the best things that ever happened in this country was the mass housing programme of Alhaji Lateef Jakande, when he was the first civilian governor of Lagos State, between 1979 and 1983. I want President Buhari and Mr Babatunde Fashola to recreate the mass housing magic of Jakande across the country.

Apart from steel rod, more than 90 per cent of the building materials required for housing development are available in the country, without the need for importation: cement, sand, gravel, chippings, paint, roof­ing sheets, plastic pipe for plumbing, water cistern toilets, water tanks, wood, aluminum profiles. You don’t need much foreign content to build an affordable house. We have the manpower and technical expertise for mass housing development. The only thing lacking is political will on the part of the government to har­ness all these benefits.

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