Govt should empower citizens to own houses
Housing is a basic need for every human being. As a basic need, it is made a fundamental human right by the national, regional or international law. In Nigeria, this is the one right that the government is in constant violation of either by creating policies that make it near impossible for citizens to own their own houses or decent accommodations, or by engaging in constant brazen destruction of people's property and settlements in the name of reclaiming the lands for developmental purposes.
This situation has left the citizens with no option but to resign to fate as the government applies the Land Use Act to favour the rich and throw the poor into deeper poverty and misery, with no hope of owning their own houses.
In this interview with THE GUARDIAN'S IBE UWALEKE, Executive Director of the Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC), Felix Morka, paints the ugly picture of this hopelessness of the majority of Nigerians.
He also speaks about the efforts made so far by his organisation to make sure that the 300,000 Maroko evictees, who were thrown into the streets in 1990 by the military government of Col. Raji Rasaki, get justice for the alleged destruction of their community 19 years ago.
IS housing or shelter in a Nigerian environment a right or privilege?
Housing unequivocally is a fundamental human right, a basic human right that anyone has. It is a right because the law says so, national, regional or international law. A right is a privilege and entitlement that is legally instrumented. There is no question again whether housing is a legal right, what we should concern ourselves now is how we should go about achieving it.
How do we compel government to provide this basic need of man and by which process?
The citizens of Nigeria have a right to adequate housing. Housing that is habitable, housing that is affordable, housing that is acceptable and housing that is quantitative. These are the attributes that must be present, otherwise, it is not a house. A house must promote the wellbeing of the individuals that live in it. The problem we have is that our people do not still know that they have a right to housing. This does not mean that people have a right to get free houses from government. The government has a duty to ensure that every system in a society, in the economy, in the political sphere, in the budgetary sphere and legal sphere, is organised and orchestrated to enable people realise their right to housing.
For example, when a government allows cement, which is a primary major input to housing construction to sell at 500 per cent over the world market price, that government is basically in violation of the right to housing. There is no reason for cement to cost 500 or more per cent over the world market price. Don't forget that cement is also publicly quoted and traded in the Nigerian Stock Exchange. When you take the price and compare with what we buy here, the government has through its policy, licensed a cartel that is bleeding everybody, making it impossible for you and I to develop housing. As a journalist if you earn enough from your job, you should be able over a period of time to develop your own house, if the material input is within reach.
Another way the government, through its policy violates citizens' rights to adequate housing is the elitist, bureaucratic and corrupt mismanagement of the Land Use Act (LUA). This is a deliberate transmortification of the purpose of the Land Use Act, which vests the power to allocate land in the governance of every state so that everybody can access housing.
In Lagos State for instance, like in every state, if you go to the Ministry of Lands to apply for a piece of land and you want 30x60 feet of land, you will never get allocation. They will want you to apply for 60x70 square metres of land, which is the minimum. In any case, this size of piece of land costs between N5 to N20 million, depending on the location. How is it possible for a civil servant, even a director in the ministry to ever save enough money to buy one plot of land. Obviously, many Nigerians through government policy are prevented from aspiring to build their own property because access to land is near impossibility. So unless you are wealthy, you cannot afford to buy land in any decent area in Nigeria.
This is the reason many people today in Nigeria live in slums because these are the only areas they can acquire lands. Through government policy, it retards the production and enlargement of the housing stock contrary to its obligation. If government has a duty to provide housing, it has to make cement and other material inputs to be affordable. Land must also be made available.
The third dimension is that there is a principle of law, international human rights law, which says that if you cannot improve the housing of someone or a group or community, don't destroy it. If you say this area is a slum, it has no amenities, you must have the will and commitment to build a resettlement for the people living there, otherwise, you should not destroy the settlement. But what we have in Nigeria is a situation where government has made forceful eviction, demolition and destruction, a state policy. The government has made demolition a tool for urban planning and engineering. The government acts first before it goes back to think.
Unfortunately under the civilian administration, the practice has not changed. The current state governments have continued to pursue the policies of the previous military regimes.
When can an individual or a group subsume their right to allow government recover their property for developmental purposes?
Under no circumstances.
Why?
Certainly, not without their consent or approval. You cannot impose obligation on any one without obtaining permission. You cannot commit someone to a project without his participation. If I am going to sacrifice my land in order to allow Lagos, for instance, to develop, it must be voluntary. But if you bring bulldozers in the morning to destroy settlements of people and one week after the destruction, you announce to the world that the destruction is part of the contribution of the people to develop, this is an outrage and the height of crass irresponsibility, lawlessness and criminality. The fact that it is done by a government does not make it legal and right.
This brings me to the question of the destruction of Maroko area of Lagos, which was carried out by the military regime of Col. Raji Rasaki in 1990. Your organisation, Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC), has been fighting for the proper resettlement of the evictees of Maroko for over 19 years now without relenting despite the fact that demolition of slums in Nigeria has been an on-going thing. What special interest does your organisation have on the Maroko issue?
For your information, SERAC is involved in the recent demolition of waterfront in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. In fact, we are leading efforts in ensuring the protection of the housing rights of the residents of waterfront. In Abuja also, SERAC is the most visible organisation working in the communities that were destroyed by Nasir el-Rufai's administration. So, our work is not confined to only Maroko, but expansive. To answer your question, we are extremely interested in the Maroko case because it is watershed. It was the first most brazen urban dislocation where 300,000 people were thrown into the street. The destruction of Maroko paved the way for the destruction of Rainbow Town. It was when Lagos State government destroyed Maroko and got away with it that Rivers State government decided to do the same, by demolishing Rainbow Town.
The Maroko case set a very bad precedent on how we manage our urban space, urban challenges. You don't destroy a community to repair anything. When government does that without some sort of planning and resettlement, government is not solving the problem, but relocating the problem. Before Maroko was destroyed, Lagos State had 50 slums. After Maroko was destroyed, Lagos has now over 100 slums. This is because these 300,000 people who were displaced in Maroko area have to live somewhere. The people cannot evaporate unless it is by circumstance of death.
Our commitment as an organisation to the Maroko case is that unless it is solved and resolved by restoring a sense of justice and fairness so that the message will be sent that when a community is destroyed with reckless abandon, it does not matter how long it takes, the destroyer must be brought to justice one day whether it is done through the local court or national court or through other processes.
He must be made to pay compensation. This is democracy. This is building the rule of law. Our quest to prove the rule of law in the case of Maroko is the reason we have stayed with them and the reason we are going to stay another 20 years, if we have to, in order to solve the problem. We will also use it to send signal to other states that injustice cannot be perpetrated by anyone whether it is a government or not. The rule of law must be respected. Government must at all times balance social and development purpose with human content. Development is supposed to bear witness to conducive upliftment of the human condition. Development that is not enriching the quality of life of people is not development. If you provide opportunity for the elite to enjoy whereby a great majority of poor people are banished from their land to deeper poverty, that is not development; it is only an outrageous act.
Maroko was destroyed by a military government that did not respect rule of law, yet your organisation is still asking for compensation for the evictees. What is the basis for your insistence?
Must we applaud the military because they were lawless by design or practice? The case of Maroko is a human rights violation just like a journalist who is imprisoned wrongly by a military government. The same way a civilian government is expected to review the terms and circumstances of the imprisonment is the same way it is expected to do it in the case of Maroko. By the way, government is a continuum. Government is not Tinubu or Fashola or Rasaki. Government is government because it is an institution. Whoever inherits it, inherits all assets and liabilities of the government. This is the reason government must act responsibly at all times, whether military or civilian. No one invites the military to come to power, but when they come to power, they must bear a responsibility to honour the rule of law. That they may disrespect it does not mean it is right, it does not mean it is proper. It is only in Nigeria that all the generals who stole this country dry, are still parading with pride their loot, causing more trouble and inflicting more hardship on the people. If it were to be in other countries, many of them would have been humbled, imprisoned. People like Pinotche even at 90 years old, were sent to jail for corruption.
What type of society do we have where we are not able to make decision on a scale of justice about what is at stake, but always about who is involved? We implore the courts to exercise due vigilance in reaching their verdicts. Whether it is a housing right or civil political right issue, the call to justice is the same.
I guess the Maroko matter is in court?
The Maroko matter has been in court since 1990. All the state government has done is to use every means to slow the case. But now, we are making a lot of progress. We have taken the matter to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), Lord Peter Goldsmith, a former Minister of Justice of the United Kingdom under Tony Blair, a co-counsel on behalf of SERAC, is leading the case before the African Commission.
The Lagos State House of Assembly in 2005 passed a unanimous resolution calling on the government of Lagos State to resettle all Maroko people after they reviewed what happened in the case following the petition SERAC brought on behalf of Maroko people. But the government has ignored its own resolution. The Oputa panel report recommending for the resettlement of these people has also been ignored.
So what we are doing now is to flag off a training programme to train the youth in the community because we have this social housing programme in which we are planning to build a pilot housing scheme of about 550 housing units of one, two and three-bedroom at a cost a government will use in building the so-called low cost housing to make it descent and affordable for the people to have their sense of dignity.
Where is the location of this low cost housing estate?
We are looking at alternative locations. One is the Lekki Corridor; another one is the Ikorodu area. This is very deliberate. Before the housing construction starts, these trainees would have been qualified and experienced. We are also bringing in a cutting edge technological equipment called the mobile brick factory that crushes rubbles and converts same to building material.
This is the means we want to bring the cost of construction of these housing units down because it is going to produce building bricks at the cost you buy the ordinary blocks in the streets. The factory will also produce bricks in commercial quantity so that the revenue realised from the sales will be used to subsidise the production of these houses to make them affordable. Since it is gong to be affordable, the people will also have the opportunity of paying for the houses for a period of 15 years.
Is the idea to build these houses to give the people a sense of belonging and at the same time retaining the name of Maroko now as a modern settlement, not as a slum as it was known in the past?
That is the idea. The transformation of value. We want the name of Maroko to go from disempowerment to empowerment, from slum to beauty, to go from indignity to dignity and from insecurity to security. We want that name which has been associated with slum to also be transformed in a way that will bear witness to other slums that a slum can be transformed to a modern settlement for human habitation.
What gingered your interest to organise this training programme for skill acquisition for Maroko youths not only to use it to build their own houses but also for their own economic benefits?
It is a deliberate part of the strategy. It is an integrated programme that is not just the housing construction but also economic empowerment, skill acquisition and micro-credit. We are going also to renew a micro-credit programme for Maroko women to the tune of N60 million to help them boost their economic activity and enlarge their income. Right now, they have a co-operative society where they are saving money already for this housing project.
Who are you sponsors?
We have quite a good number of collaborators like the Dutch Development Agency, the Ford Foundation and a United Nations (UN) agency. We are also reaching out to private companies, cement manufacturers and distributors so as to subsidise the cost of the housing units.
