As the nation continues to grapple with the challenge of housing for its citizens, the President, Nigeria Institute of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), Emeka Eleh, in this interview with CATHERINE AGBO, says the deficit can only be addressed through amendments to the Land Use Act, a working mortgage system and private sector participation. He also speaks on the role of NIESV in the economy.
In your assessment, how would you say the institute has contributed to the development of the built industry in Nigeria?
We have done so well and our contributions have been phenomenal. We pride ourselves as the leaders of the built environment with versatile training in the entire construction industry. If you look at the development process, for instance, you will see that our members play a pivotal role from the beginning to the end. When you decide to carry out development, we can source a site for you, let you know the kind of project you should develop, do an appraisal to let you know the viability of what you are doing and, even after that, we can assemble the team that will do the development on your behalf, manage the development process as project managers and, even upon completion, we can stay back to manage it as facility managers to ensure that it is well maintained to yield the desired results.
Our members are very active in construction and development sector and some of us are taking it as primary roles; we play both advisory roles, advising actors in the sector. Some of our members are role players, doing their own development.
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How well have you been embraced by the public and private sector?
The roles I just said we play are played for all sectors. We do development appraisals for all sectors, project management for all sectors. We manage properties for all sectors. So, in terms of sectoral spread, we are well spread. Our members are playing active roles and those of us who are directly into building and development have done estates in various areas which are presently occupied.
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When an estate surveyor is mentioned, what readily comes to mind is the house agent. Could this be for lack of information or because members of your association also play the roles of agents?
Call it lack of information which has rubbed off negatively on us. An estate surveyor is not a house agent but may be involved in estate agency, which has to do with the buying and selling and leasing of property. It is part of what we do, but we are estate surveyors and valuers and we like to be addressed as such. Estate agency is part of what we do but, unfortunately, it happens to be the one the public hears so much about, and also happens to be the one that tends to rub off negatively on our image because of the impact of the quacks – those who are not trained but are practising it. When people do what they are not trained for, things always go wrong. So, when we see those people called house agents all over the place duping people and rendering what we call unprofessional services, we are concerned, and this profession is doing everything it can to bring that body under regulation to ensure that everybody practising as an agent must have a minimum level of qualification and a definite address so that if you do anything, we know where to find you. All our members, for instance, have addresses and you know where to find everyone, but what you see is that, most times, the offices of these agents are in their briefcases and when you deal with them today, tomorrow they disappear. So, for us, it’s a consumer protection function we want to play, to help the consuming public so that they won’t be falling prey to these people.
Unfortunately, even learned men and women, people who ordinarily should know, still go to them, sometimes because they say it is cheaper – which is wrong; sometimes they say because they are the ones available – which is also wrong, because our members are all over the country. I keep saying that quackery is in every profession and the sad thing is that people fall for quacks even when they should not. It is the same way somebody who wants to invest millions of naira in a development does not get an engineer and does the development by himself and the building collapses and he loses everything just because of a little amount of money he would have paid an engineer.
So, it’s a matter of perception and ours is to create the awareness and that’s what we are doing, to educate the public on the need to deal with professionals in order to get professional service. And I assure you that, even in terms of cost, you get it at a cheaper cost; and even when you feel one of our members hasn’t treated you fairly, come back to us, don’t waste your money going to the court or police, because we have what we call the code of ethics and practice which establishes how every member should practice and comport himself when dealing with a third party. So, when you feel short changed, come back to us and we will hear you and the person. We have a committee known as the professional conduct committee, and anybody who goes against our rules ends up in that committee; and where you are found to have done something wrong, you are sanctioned and whatever amendments you have to make to the third party you dealt with, we insist that you do it. And that is the major difference between us and the quacks. So, answering your question again, estate agency is a minor part of what we do which tends to be the public face that carries with it a lot of negative vibes, which we are working hard to change for the sake of the country.
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Are you satisfied with the level of maintenance of high profile buildings in the country, including government property like stadia, airports and the like?
No, we are not and we have been complaining. In fact, its part of the issue we intend to raise when we visit one of the government officials. The fact is that government’s assets are not well maintained and we keep incurring unnecessary cost in rebuilding. Maintenance is a chain and if you undertake preventive maintenance, issues won’t get as bad as they do. If you go to many of our public buildings, the lifts are not working. I was at the (Federal) Secretariat and the lift in the block I went to was not working and we had to climb five floors, but if you go to a building belonging to a private enterprise, you just push the button and the lift will take you up there.
Our roads get broken down but roads don’t break down in one day. You see, a small pothole today and nobody attends to it and it expands until the road cuts up in two and they start having meetings to repair it, and you wonder why it wasn’t attended to when it started. I keep saying that we must run the government the way we run our homes. We must maintain our public infrastructure and assets the way we maintain our homes. No father comes in from work to see that he has a leaking roof that won’t want to fix it the next day.? It may just be a small opening that is dropping water but, I tell you, before two days the father will run around and get a carpenter to fix it. He won’t wait for the roof to be blown away because you know that if you do so the rain will fall on your children and cost you more to fix when it is completely damaged. But it appears that, in this country, all we do is just wait for things to get very bad before we start making amends; that is wrong.
Our members are facility and property managers with experience in maintenance and gathering those who will do it, the logistics and assembling a team that can get things to work. We are saying that the government must use those who are trained who can do the job to do it because if a public building is under maintenance, it won’t get bad: the lift will work; the water will run; the light will be there, and things will run properly and the building will be well maintained, because if a building is well maintained. It means it is able to maintain its optimal value over time because anytime that value is being affected, things will be done to ensure that the value is not degraded. Same with the roads; you see, new roads being built without maintenance strategies in place. Look at Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, that was the pride of everybody when it was built, today. But, like I said, roads don’t get damaged in one day; it takes time, government functionaries will pass and everybody will pass the road and the pothole will be expanding till it gets very bad.
We are very concerned about the bad maintenance culture in the country, and our thinking is that the government should be proactive and do the right things by instituting a preventive maintenance culture. Our members, as trained maintenance professionals in this area, are willing to lend their competence to assist the government in maintaining public infrastructure, not just the buildings but infrastructure, too, because maintenance has to do with all structures, whether it is a public building, a road, parks or any public infrastructure, and it is only by so doing that you can retain and increase the value.
If you go to an estate run by private individuals, even neighbours are conscious of what others do because nobody wants the owner of the house next to his to do anything that will reduce the value of his own house,? and same way we can play our role by advising government on what it can do as it concerns our public assets which is a national heritage for everybody but, unfortunately, it is not being taken that way and these things keep running down.
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How responsive has the government been to your advocacy on maintenance of facilities and infrastructure? And apart from advocacy, are you also working on legislation that would compel that things are done the right way.
We are looking at both areas and I tell you things are changing. Some of our members now manage sections of the federal secretariat. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) also put up advertisements for management recently and its is now under proper management. The National Assembly is also now under management. It is a gradual thing and we are leading the advocacy and shouting at the top of our voices – that government should do the right thing – and some are already doing so. Take something like the insurance of public buildings, we have been talking about it and now there is a new Insurance Act that says public buildings must be insured. So, from the advocacy, we get to others. It is a bit slow, but it is catching up and now that there is a new insurance Act for public buildings, same way we will get to a point where this idea of mandatory maintenance of public buildings will be a law because, by not doing so, government is just wasting resources all over. If you don’t have the competent people to do these things, things will never work, and it is obvious.
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There is a huge housing deficit in the country; what can be done to address this?
What could be done is for the government to create an enabling environment for the private sector to play its role. We have been talking about it for a long time now, that what we need is an enabling environment, and there are too many ways of creating that environment and too many things the government can do to help the sector. Recently, the minister of information declared that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) has agreed that? one million houses will be built every year, and what crossed my mind was that we’ve heard this before, because even the Vision 20:2020 committee recommended in 2010 that they would build one million houses a year to be able to meet up the housing deficit and meet up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) housing delivery, but we know that they couldn’t do it.
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We don’t have a viable mortgage sector and you can’t solve the housing problem without mortgage. When people come in from abroad and you tell them they have to pay cash for a house, they marvel and ask why. This is despite the fact that the depth of our mortgage is so low. Whereas in some countries the housing sector contributes as much as 15 to 25 per cent to their GDP, in this country, it is less than three percent. Our mortgage penetration is even smaller than that of Ghana, which is even smaller. So, you can see that there is a challenge because the mortgage sector is not working, and you can’t solve the housing problem without developing the mortgage sector. Second is the high interest rates which are so prevalent. Investment in housing is long-term investment, and how do you borrow at the rate that is present in the banking sector?
It is not sustainable. There is also the issue of access to land and we have talked about the Land Use Act which remains an impediment to housing delivery. It was meant to make land readily available to all Nigerians, but we all know that that is not the case more because of the impediments in the very Act. If you look at all these, you’ll see that nothing has changed and there are too many issues the government needs to address. Look at the Land Use Act, for instance, we are aware that the late President, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua sent an executive Bill to the National Assembly for its review and that Bill, along with eight other housing related bills, are still there and have not been addressed. Recently, the Senate also came up with an advert about a public hearing on review of the constitution and one of the issues to be considered is the Land Use Act. We have sent our own memorandum to the Senate asking for a review of sections of that Act. Our overall goal is that there should be a reform of our land tenure system and a reform of our land policy, to make land easily available to people and for people to have access to title for their land, because part of the problem is that even though we have the Federal Mortgage Bank and National Housing Fund to which people contribute, accessing funds through those avenues is very difficult because you require titles to the property you are buying, or a collateral in the form of a title to be able to access it; and available records show that only about three per cent of the land in Nigeria is titled and this means that the other 97 per cent is what we call ‘dead capital’.
The owners can’t use it for anything because there is no document they can use to prove to a third part that this land genuinely belongs to them. Only an evidence of title, which is the certificate of occupancy, can be used. Another issue is infrastructural development. People talk of housing deficit which runs into 15 to 20 million units, but our infrastructural deficit also runs into trillions of naira. How do we develop without infrastructure? The reason why houses are even expensive in cities is because everybody is crowding within the cities. We know that in developed countries, people live in the suburbs,. But in this environment people don’t, because if they do, they won’t get to work. So people crowd those areas where there is a semblance of infrastructure. Housing remains a major challenge and it requires the very proactive action of the government to solve it. All we are asking is for the government to do what it is supposed to do regarding some of these issues. The minister of Housing and Urban Development recently launched the social housing policy and we also support it even though we believe that housing should be left to the private sector, to thrive. We also know that there are those who may not be able to afford the private sector kind of pricing, so the government must play a role in the form of social housing initiatives. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), for instance, was set up to facilitate social housing but, of course, it is now more of a profit making body even though it doesn’t do much of it. But the truth is that the government must play its role because you can’t have a decent society if everybody is not housed.
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Apart from the issues you outlined, the high cost of housing has been attributed to the high cost of building materials; what other alternatives can be looked at apart from existing ones?
You see, we keep talking of other methods used abroad that can generate mass housing, but you know that our construction process is such that it is difficult to replicate in large numbers within a short while. In Europe and the developed world, they can build a house in weeks because it is? prefabricated – they just bring it and set it up and it’s there. We are saying that government should enable people that can bring in materials to be used for mass housing, because mass housing, by its connotation, means that multiple units are being generated within a very short while. The brick and mortar process is difficult because of the time and resources it takes. I read a document from Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN) on how using red bricks the chairman of REDAN built houses in Kwara State for N2 or N3 million per unit; that is what we call mass housing. It is only in this country that people build houses of N20 million and they say it is mass housing. How many people can afford that? So we must develop those materials that can be used to build in a way that it will be cheap and fast, and one way of achieving it is through system building, prefabricated units and red bricks. But the government must intervene in the sector – as it has done in other sectors, to enable those who can play the role to bring in the materials that can be able to solve the deficit.
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As president of the association, what have been your efforts in repositioning it?
Part of what we are doing is to create awareness about who we are and what we do. Part of the challenge we have is telling people how useful we are to the growth of any economy. We are land resource managers trained to manage the land resources of any country and as members of this profession we are able to manage the land resources of the country in a way that it will be useful and beneficial to the country and its people.
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