Unoccupied Estates In Abuja And Plight Of Residents

“One would have thought that, with the numbers of estates in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), the problem of housing in the nation’s capital will be a thing of the past. However, the reverse is the case, as countless numbers of people are still homeless and living on the streets and under bridges, because they cannot afford to pay the rent”, Igho Oyoyo shares on Leadershipng.

A country as developed as Nigeria, richly endowed and blessed with an estimated human population of over 180 million is still plagued by rising housing deficit, with a huge percentage of its population taking refuge in shanties in different parts of the country.

With research conducted on the problem of housing in the country, some housing experts gave clear analysis of how the housing deficit recently rose from seven million housing units in 1991 to between 12 and 15 million units in 2008. It peaked between 17 and 18 million units in 2012.

One of the most surprising areas of this development is that most Nigerians living in the FCT and environs have no access to decent accommodation. Worse, a rising number of completed estates in the capital city and across the country are presently unoccupied and worse, have been taken over by miscreants.

When FCT Watch visited estates in high-brow areas like Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse II and a number of estates in the capital city, most of the well completed houses remained unoccupied years after their completion, due to the high cost of renting or leasing of such property.

When LEADERSHIP visited some of these estates – Apo, Dei Dei, Gwarimpa, lugbe, Asokoro, Maitama, Wuse, Gwarimpa , Gudu, life camp and Katampe – it discovered that the unoccupied houses owned by the society’s most influential and wealthy have been converted into safe houses for the storage of their loot and venues for laundering money, in order to keep away sniffing anti-graft agencies.

Strangely, some of these housing units are leased out by the gatemen to desperate house seekers, in order to make some money by the side. Who can blame them, when the owners of some of these building have not visited the area for more than seven years and, as a result, know very little about the state of their property.

A four-bedroom bungalow in Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse and Garki goes for between N3m and N5m a year, while those who wish to occupy the same type of apartments in satellite towns like Gwarinpa, Kubwa, Lugbe and Karu, among others, must cough out between N800, 000 and N1.5m in some estates.

The under-developed areas have become some form of choice for low-income individuals.

However, some residents of the FCT who spoke to FCT Watch disclosed that the high cost of rent is the major reason why most of these houses have remained unoccupied in the FCT. Greed, they said, is another factor.

A resident of Gwarinpa Estate, Gladys Chukwuemeka, hammered on the urgent need for the owners of such houses in the FCT to have a change of heart and fix rents which are affordable. Chukwuemeka also called for a system in place to checkmate the massive rise in the number of unoccupied homes in the territory.

“Usually, money launderers are the ones who built those estates that are unoccupied for years; that is why they do not care if the houses are empty, since they are built with free money and are eager to recoup their funds with high rents and can afford to have their houses unoccupied in Abuja, because no charges or property taxes were imposed on the property.

“Most of these landlords didn’t take any loans to build these houses. But, if we have operative laws which ensure that there are taxes and levies on these houses, they would think twice about the economic sense of constructing houses and keeping them shut for two to three years,” Chukwuemeka said.

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A land surveyor at the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), Agada James, disclosed that most of the houses are owned by top-ranking civil servants and politicians, who have relatives or colleagues ‘fronting’ as owners, saying that some of the property owners have long forgotten that their houses are left unoccupied.

“People want to live in those houses, because of the environment, but the outrageous fees often charged by property owners contribute to the houses being vacant for years. The rents are just too high to afford; that is why some of these houses are presently occupied by rats and reptiles. They prefer to leave them unoccupied than to lease them out for fees below their target. They do not care about the housing challenges in the city,” he said.

A civil servant with the Head of Service of the Federation, Solomon Gana, expressed doubts and disappointments over the sincerity of the government’s claims to make housing for all a reality. The erection of exhorbitant estates, without the slightest consideration of the plight of average Nigerians, in his opinion, directly results in the empty buildings.

READ ALSO – “How Mass Housing Delivery is handled in FCT”

“The number of estates springing up in the FCT are enough to make the issue of shortage of housing to be a thing of the past. Sadly, it has worsened the problem, because the estates cannot be rented by civil servants like us. The owners of these estates hardly consider the minimum wage of Nigerian workers before placing rent on their houses; that is why most of them are not occupied by any one.

“I am appealing to the Federal Government to set up laws that would check and control the rage of rents to be paid for these housing units. Better still, the government should issue a confiscation order on presently unoccupied estates if they still remain unoccupied within a specific period. I believe that if this is done, most of these estate owners will easily rent out their houses at affordable rates,” he said.

A staff of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, Gimba Isah, explained that something needs to be done urgently to bridge the housing deficit. Failure to do that, he intoned, will guarantee that 24.4 million Nigerians, at least, remain without shelter by December 2015.