Can we meet you sir?
I am DR. Oba Adetola EmmanuelKing, the group Managing Director & CEO of ADRON HOMES & PROPERTIES.
What do you do at ADRON HOMES?
Our specialty includes Estate Surveyor and valuers, Real Estates developers, property managers and housing experts.
How important is housing for every individual?
To say that shelter is a non-negotiable need of humans is to echo a truism audible to the deaf and also visible to the blind and intelligible to the nit-wit. Even lower animals in the jungle do not trivialize the instinct of self-preservation by means of housing development and management. The pride of place allotted to housing issues by the Nigerian constitution is therefore a necessity imposed by nature.
Is Nigeria doing well in-terms of Housing?
The question of housing in Nigeria has engendered countless innovations, to me, not a problem. At least, it signpost the desire of a community peopled by over 170 million heads to bridge the housing vacuum that has made tenement shelter even in a one-room apartment in most of our cities a luxury. The problem lies in the open and undeniable truth that in my beloved country housing is still the issue. this has been a seemingly intractable problem that was in the 60’s a behemoth which a large number of its few conquerors only succeeded with the aid of government’s helping hand which, in the present days has metamorphosed into a seeming spirit that my compatriots now compete to capture live, in a survival-of-the-fittest battle.
Do you think housing issues in Nigeria can be abolished or resolved?
In my own understanding, the knotty nature of housing problem in the most populous black nation has been openly acknowledged by the current Buhari’s administration. I believe drastic problem is indeed a necessity for drastic solutions, the acclaimed government of change seemed to have demonstrated through its record-breaking three-in-one merger of the works, power, and housing sectors under a single mega ministry which has been placed in a hands that is widely perceived as tested and trusted. The Ministry of Power, Works and Housing is, thus, a public confirmation of not only the perennial but also of the gargantuan nature of devaluation that the lives of Nigerians have been subjected to, with respect to these three necessities of life.
So do you believe the Minister for Power, Works and Housing is effective?
Yes, I doff my cap for the phenomenal Raji Fashola whose tested reformist capacity earned him a presidential trust that is so monumental that the nation now look up to him for salvation from darkness, infrastructure decay and homelessness.
Between Powers, Works and Housing?
Which of these needs priority?
Of these three giants, homelessness is, in my view it’s the most intricate. The other two are relatively easier to surmount or do I sound absurd?
Why have you chosen Housing?
To get my drift, my readers only need to realize that while power and physical infrastructure are communal products to be provided as a large pool from which individuals are expected to draw for personal benefits, housing is necessarily a personal service to individuals or, at most to families. This is where the knotty issues lie. This is just why the highly expansive habitable land space of Nigeria has, so far, provided shelter for far less than fifty percent of the population. This is the secret beneath the unavailability of multitudes of existing and vacant houses for the teeming masses of the nation.
In your opinion, how can we tackle the housing issue?
Against the background, our tested and trusted minister, all stakeholders and the nation as a whole, at this critical moment of our chequered history need to be pinched with some piercing needle of truth, if anything, it is a moment of change in the socio-political and economic sphere. Change! Not just of political captains, crew or cult as consummated on May 29, 2015. But! Change of a nation’s long-standing mistaken attitude that has conferred the identity of status-marker on house ownership. To be candid, for as long as housing is not perceived and treated as a social product, millions amidst the populace would remain homeless, scavenging and hibernating in public places, while millions of exotic houses owned by few of their compatriots mostly remain vacant or at best under-utilized.
In what way will ADRON HOMES AND PROPERTIES help the housing issues?
My drift is that home-ownership should never be a function of affordability, although house qualities must necessarily vary according to economic disparity, but the supposed low-cost houses in most states of contemporary Nigeria are a no-go-area for the masses. In such a context of my dream, the social content of housing investment would be contributed by government through regulatory policies that would not only assist private service providers to thrive on generally low costs but also ensure that their outputs, that is, housing products are available and affordable to the diverse socioeconomic classes of Nigerians, reflecting the universal realities of the high, middle and lower class distinctions. This is what ADRON homes and properties plans to achieve.
ADRON HOMES and properties believes that through a social reality-based revolution in the housing sector, the market would, at all times, have something, not just anything, but havens of comfort for everyone, particularly the least paid public servants currently on the statutory minimum wage of Eighteen Thousand Naira as well as the mass of self-employed traders and artisans occupying the lower space of socioeconomic activism.
One major auxiliary of this social resolution is a highly flexible payment system that would ease home-ownership through an income-friendly mortgage system. Through the payment of monthly stipends by low-income earners, ordinarily ‘unaffordable’ housing products would thus become affordable to the largest chunk of the populace.
Finally, what do you have to say to prospective clients and readers?
Lastly, since no barber can be so skillfully efficient that he would have another person’s head while the head owner cum carrier is absent, the cooperation of the people, the citizens, whose interest is to be served through social innovations in the housing sector, can and must be pragmatically enlisted. The bitter realities of the ‘omo onile’ (family land owner) syndrome, which I intend to dwell on in subsequent articles, should be seen and treated as a necessity which is a mother of inventions that would facilitate the banishment of homelessness in Nigeria.