 You're welcome back. We're being joined by Nick Agouli, like I said, and we're going to be talking about the housing problems in Nigeria and how to solve them. We have a very short time to discuss these. I'd like to say welcome to Nick Agouli. Thank you very much. Good morning to all of you. Okay. Nigeria is facing a lot of problems, but one of the very critical ones is housing, because apart from food, the next thing is housing, and then you were talking about clothing. So in that order, and now housing, we seem to have a deficit in housing. It's already a problem. How do we solve that? That's the question and maybe the only question we're asking on this segment right now. Do you have solutions to it? And thank you very much. And there is no doubt that Nigeria has a huge housing deficit. If you look at, people are living more or less in squalor in the most parts, and this problem has persisted for a very long time. And there are all sorts of cheating problems arising from land acquisition, the high cost of building materials as most of them are imported, and all sorts of racketeering and sub-practices that exist in the sector. All these don't go well for investments in the sector. And what we have been witnessing so far is Nigerians are not living in different conditions. And you rightly said so because the basic physiological needs are food, shelter, and clothing. And in Nigeria, food is also a problem. So in answer to your questions directly, what can be done? What needs to be done will have to be a multi-level approach. The government has to do its own part. The investing community, the private sector, have to do their own part. And those who want to either rent houses or buy houses have to do their own part. Now, if we look at the side of the government, we need the government to be an enabler. The government needs to be the body that ensures that land acquisition is seamless, that ensures that people who want to invest in housing don't have any stumbling blocks to do that. And there is free flow of investment in the sector, either domestically or foreign. So far, we have some of the state governments who have been able to digitalize the land acquisition and administration processes. And we need more state governments to do that because by the Land Use Act, the title in land in Nigeria, across Nigeria rests with state governments. And so all state governments in Nigeria need to upgrade to digital platforms in terms of land administration to make it easy for people to acquire title, to make it easy for people to search for title to land so that these will encourage people to come into the sector. Because right now investors are not coming because one of the easiest places where you can be scammed is in the housing sector. Either a piece of land has been sold to multiple buyers or a piece of property has been sold to multiple buyers. It's very difficult to determine the exact ownership of landed property, either the land or the houses that stand on them. So that is for the state government. And also the federal government has to initiate policies. And this is where fiscal policy and monetary policy comes into play. Nigeria, as we have today, is suffering what we call stark inflation, meaning there is low output. And that low output is resulting in high unemployment. And that high unemployment resultant from low output is bringing about a hyperinflation. And so in an inflationary regime, it becomes very difficult for consumers to acquire goods and property. Because if you save to buy a land property, it is in no time, you will see that the price has escalated beyond the point at which you have saved. Fiscal and monetary policy that will make it possible for the economy to grow up. Because it is only a growing economy that will generate effective demand for housing. Also, as part of our monetary policy at the federal level, mortgage loans should be made cheaply available to buyers. In other times, once a graduate leaves school, he lands a job. And after he lands a job, on the basis of the job that he has landed, he is able to assess a mortgage loan at very cheap interest rates. The mortgage loan will usually be at anything at 5% interest rates or below it. And with that, this young graduate is able to buy a house. That means demand for housing becomes high and investors are happy and they come and start investing to build more houses since graduates and those who are in employment are buying these houses. And they are not buying these houses with their own cash. They are buying their houses because the banking system is the one that is paying for these houses. And now these workers now will be paying this mortgage, repaying the mortgage from their salaries. And now the advantage here is that instead of paying rents, they are now repaying for their houses while they live in those houses. So after 20, 25, 30 years, they finish paying the mortgage and the house belongs to them in their retirement. So they don't have a run lot in their retirement to be breathing down their neck. Now you also discover that if these young graduates and other employees did not have access to cheap mortgage as is the case in Nigeria, they don't have adequate housing. So they end up either squatting with colleagues or staying in some sort of squalor. And that then means they will be paying rents. You can pay rent for 20 years to a landlord and not even a window under house belongs to you. So you will go into retirement with a house and continue to live in squalor until you are there, which is very painful. So monetary policy by the government must support this. The idea that the central bank continuously calls into the Monetary Policy Committee and comes up with increases in interest rates is not supporting growth in the Nigerian economy. It's killing growth in the Nigerian economy. The Nigerian economy is not suffering from inflation. It's suffering from backflation. When it is backflation, increases in interest rates are no longer infrastructure. Like now, I am in Makodi. I am on my way to Abuja. I am going to drive. I just stopped to take this interview. It's going to take me about five hours to drive from here to Abuja. So if I were to go to Abuja and come back, it will take me ten hours on the road. Whereas if the government makes it possible for Ray infrastructure to be built by the private sector, a fast train from this Makodi to Abuja will be just one hour. I will leave the center of Makodi, I'll be at the center of Abuja. Then we make it possible for me to leave Makodi and work in Abuja. I go to work one hour to Abuja. After work, I enter a train one hour and back here in Makodi. Where housing will be cheaper? Are any salaries of Abuja paying housing cheaper in Makodi? So I have better demand. And investors will see that and they will build the houses as government is opening up the roads, the rail and the water transportation networks across the country. So there's a lot that the government will have to do. The same thing comes to the investors. The investors in housing. Right now, you will see that it is more about making money than delivering the service. Investors in housing have to understand that the image in the housing sector is very bad. Because like I said earlier, housing is one sector of the Nigerian economy where you can easily discount. And people who are operating by building and selling or letting out housing have to understand that they need to focus on providing quality service which will attract people to come and invest in the housing. It is when people now know that if I buy a piece of land, if I buy a house, it's going to be legitimate. Otherwise, those who are afraid to come into the sector will not come in to boost the growth in that sector. And there is something there for the government to do as well because you know a government should be there to be an enabler of business. And if government is saying that there's all sorts of racketeering in the housing sector it belongs on the government to take decisive action to ensure that those who have found one thing as operators in the sector have got to book to sanitize the sector. Coming to the consumers themselves, those who are buying houses, you know this is one of the areas that has brought about a lot of corruption in Nigeria because the interest rates are very high. People cannot access cheap credit to buy houses but workers are now having to carry out all sorts of corrupt practices to try and raise money to go and buy housing in cash. So you have to raise your 10 million, your 20 million, your 50, your 100 million depending on the location you want to buy the housing in cash so that you won't buy a house. And what we're saying here is that if government takes the necessary steps then you will discover that the consumers of the housing sector will now no longer be pushed to engage in corrupt practices to buy houses. They will be able to buy houses on mortgages, live in their houses, pay off their houses and live in their houses in retirement and when there are no more, their families in early days are set and continue either living there, renting it out or selling it. So this is a multi-level approach to the housing situation in Nigeria and before the last point I want to make here is that another issue with housing in Nigeria is that if you go to cities like Abuja where I'm heading to right now majority of houses in the city centre of Abuja are empty and this is an area that the government must take decisive action. You cannot be a government and have people living homelessly and then houses that are being occupied are cockroaches and rats and you are not doing anything about it. Government must take decisive action to say if a house remains unoccupied, perhaps for a period of 3 or 6 months the government will take that building and give it out as social housing, as part of social housing and if government takes that steps, the large large of those houses that are lying empty all over the country will know that they will either put human beings in those houses or they are going to lose those houses to the social housing scheme and the other thing you will see is that there are other building projects in all our cities you will see this building project they have raised the structure and then they have abandoned it year and year and year as you are seeing that structure there nobody is completing it nobody is finishing it the land upon which the structure is standing is occupied not available to any other developer that is another area where the government must take decisive action if you buy a piece of land and you are not able to develop it say in a period of between 6 to 1 year you must give up that piece of land to somebody else who will develop it if you have occupied a piece of land with an uncompleted structure you either finish up that structure and let human beings that live in it that building or you lose it and government can hand over such structures to investors who will finish it up and give it to human beings to occupy so the former owners can be paid off a bit of money for their efforts so these house levels but government is the one that must be in the reach because Nigerians, like I said earlier, are living in squalor if you compare the way we are living the environments we are living, our neighborhoods and what people elsewhere are living and you know, as you were even in the developed world like in the United Kingdom you will see that government is like a father when a family falls on hard times and there is unemployment in the family the government provides social housing, they call it council housing government provides council housing to that family so that the family will not be pushed to the streets so that government is strong yet the government needs to sit up and that is the whole crux of the matter so that the investors will be encouraged the people who are the consumers will be encouraged and everybody will be better for it we would like to thank you and Nick for your time this morning even though you are in a hurry to get to Abuja safe journey to Abuja thank you very much and I wish all of you a happy day all right, you too okay, I've been talking with Nika Gulay a social commentator and we're talking about the problem of housing in Nigeria we're going to follow up that same topic by looking at the real estate sector we're zeroing in on that we'll take a short break now and we'll be back in a moment, stay with us