The rising cost of housing in Nigeria is a problem that needs attention. Because people can no longer afford to pay for good accommodation, they're forced to live in slums-residential areas that are detrimental to their health, as these places has limited access to clean water and sanitation amongst other leading to high exposure to diseases due to poor hygiene and waste management. Although there are factors that actually contributed to this increase likely scarcity of houses, cost of acquiring a land, construction cost and maintenance etc there's a government in place that's supposed to regulate all these, at times I wonder what the ministry of housing and urban development is for.
Sincerely even myself am tired with the continued hike in cost of living in Nigeria, things are literally so expensive that i wonder how low income earners are surviving, the worst of it is this continues increase in house rent, well i literally attribute the high cost of housing to bad government policies, bad governance have made it impossible for our industries to work, if our industries was working well most of the building materials would have been produced here in Nigeria and the issue of importation tax would have been completely eradicated and price of building materials will have reduced drastically and house rent would have been reduced, secondly bad government policies have literally made it impossible to control landlords rent prices, no form of price regulation at all because same government accept bribe from landlords and allow them build in places that is against the urban/rural plan hence literally don’t have a say in house prices regulations, thirdly our government isn’t investing in housing, the government in most countries always invest in housing thereby creating a competitive market between government owned houses and private house owners but the reverse is the case in Nigeria, our government cares only about money laundering.
I believe that only our government have the capacity to regulate the prices of housing if only they can make good policies that will control price of building materials and also regulate house rent prices, if possible also give subsidy to housing and also build government owned houses for rent that will be low in prices, thereby giving private house owners a tough competition because trust me if the government builds a lot of houses and keep the rent at a very low price the private house owners (Landlords) will have no choice but to reduce there prices too.
