By Aaron Ossai

Former Chief Building Engineer, Cross River State Government, Lands and Housing, Engr. Fidel Aju Ogar has said that provision of low cost houses for low income earners is capable of solving the prevalent housing deficit in Nigeria.

Ogar who stated this in a paper titled ‘Delivering (Actually) Affordable Shelter’ at a workshop in Abuja said although previous governments have tried without success to provide affordable houses to Nigerians through some mortgage financing programmes, a robust and holistic approach must be taken to reduce the deficit which according to him is over 17 million.

According to Ogar who was also the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN Cross River State Chapter candidate for House of Representatives in 2011, there is an urgent need to review the existing land acquisition process especially in the area of cost and time involved in the processing of documents among other obvious official bottle necks.

Speaking further, Engr. Ogar who has so far handled high profile building projects across the country noted that there must also be a technical mindset renewal on the part of built-environment professionals especially the design team and building team to ensure steady progress in the provision of affordable houses to Nigerians.

“They need to embrace and nurture the neo-culture of building-technology-driven options with the technical character and courage to change by challenging the existing norm, less of conformity and more of change to focalize instead of dispersing resources with emphasis on R&D, establishment of shelter-innovation-parks to stimulate budding but fund-strapped building activists”, he said.

He explained that there is also the need to renew the end-user mindset which according to him could easily be achieved if governments will fund, build and use low cost shelter themselves so that the people can copy their example.

“To provide affordable houses to Nigerians, government should address critical essentials which are basic direly needed housing as against socially accepted standards.  We must need to redefine standards and establish accurate clearly defined statistics of the housing situation in categories according to usage among others.

“Government should also establish a shelter task force or bureau answerable to the presidency which must be sensitive enough to be both organic and orgnised which should be drawn from the relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs.

“The effect of the spinoff from this on employment/unemployment and its sheer impacts in terms of trickle down employment generation ability is a huge plus in our other mammoth-sized challenge called unemployment.

“We must see the desired progression on the deconstruction of the housing deficit as workable inspite of the daunting realities on ground.  We can slow down the growth, neutralize the growth and possibly keep a step or two ahead of the growth rate.  This obviously is a herculean task and will take time and resolve, but then, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step forward”, he stated.

On the need for the composition of a task team, Engr. Ogar said it will create a compact and organic task team comprising of the built-environment personnel to act as a penetration unit to show practically and create an enabling housing environment with and for other stakeholders in recognition of the fact that the housing deficit is a steady growing mammoth and therefore an emergency situation.

According to him, the mission of the team will be but not limited to execute government components of the social housing intervention to the later, intervention to act as an exemplar to the collaborators or private housing concerns as well as to create a new building culture (techno-driven approaches) to drive down the cost and redeem the existing situations from the tyranny of the familiar building tradition.