In a bid to mark World Habitat Day, the United Nations Habitat has urged City planners all around the world to take action and close the gap for safer places for the respective populations.
The Executive Director, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) Maimunah Mohd Sharif, while commemorating the World Habitat Day, in Abuja, noted that the gap of inequalities should be closed by providing shelter to all people.
Speaking further, she said the new rate of poor people occasioned by conflict, covid-19, and climate change which has swelled the number of people affected between 119 and 124 million in 2020, and between 143 and 163 million in 2021.
The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, while explaining the action taken by the Nigerian government to close the gap inline with the “Mind the Gap. Leave No One and Place Behind,” slogan of the 2022 Habitat day, said the National Housing Programme (NHP) has achieved that
under her housing programme.
According to him, the programme which was being executed across Nigeria has 43 sites in 35 state and a total of 6,022 housing units to deliver has completed 2,864 units.
Fashola stated that the project helped supported many families among which was the engagement of 1,245 building contractors with 29,030 direct jobs created and another 57,874 indirect jobs created in the economy and closed the gap of inequality.
Fashola the National Housing programme utilized local resources in line with the Nigerian local content laws.
He pointed out that in its determination to close the gap and leave no one or place behind, the Federal government approved the waiver of the statutory 5% and 15% to provide more access to Nigerians desiring befitting accommodation but were hindered by these conditions.
His words: “FMBN’s policies such as the reduction of equity contribution from 5% to 0% for those seeking mortgage loans of up to N5 million, and reduction from 15% to 10% for those seeking loans of N15 million are helping to ease access to housing just as its operational performance up to the second Quarter of this year shows.”
Earlier in its call to action to the Nigerian government for befitting and safer cities, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) urged Nigerian policymakers and stakeholders in the built sector to ensure that sustainable habitat was achieved to prevent making communities prisons and not allow them to turn to places of crime, instead of safe places for all.
Head of Department (HOD), Information, NLC, Comrade Benson Opah said this at the commemoration of 2022, Urban October in Abuja.
He said: ”In the past, cities offered hope, and this was responsible for the massive rural-urban migration.
“Today, these cities offer less hope even as an alternative to them. Cities have become open prisons, places of harassment places festering with crime, instead of places of production and hope.
“Yet we must go beyond criticism to offer solutions that are at Worlds imaginative, practical and realistic.
In furtherance of this, we will call on people-centred policies to be faithfully implemented without partisan consideration.
Access to land and cost should be made more friendly for working families in both formal and informal sectors. City designs should take on board, the interests of the poor, unlike Abuja which is apartheid in design and implementation.
”The poor call to service the city and retreat to their hovels at the end of the day, creating a traffic nightmare on all the access roads in and out of the city.
“The construction community, here we mean architects, town planners, engineers, and so should sit down and look inward and make use of our local resources instead of being dependent on imports.
“The capacity of the federal mortgage bank, our only bank of this nature in the country, should be strengthened to accommodate demands.
It is the only bank that offers true Mortgage Services as it was accepted to manage the growing gap, except we manage the growing poverty, then growing dispossession and growing anger. There will be a price to pay,” Upah concludes.
