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| 3-October-2024 |
These posts provide an overview of the growing need for homes and the widespread slum dwelling forced on to Nigerians by gaping social inequalities. Tom also looks at the potential for housing needs to be met in sustainable ways that do not aggravate the climate crisis or other ruptures of society’s relationship with nature. He pays attention, as he did in his pamphlet on Decarbonising the Built Environment, published here last year, to the technologies that can allow us to live in harmony with our natural surroundings, and the obstacles put in front of those technologies by capital and the political structures that serve it.
Housing needs
One of the most basic human needs is the need for habitation. We need to think of decent housing as a universal human right.
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| Protest against forced evictions at Otodo Gbame, Lagos State, 2016. Photo: Justice & Empowerment Initiatives |
Homes the world over should effectively protect people from the elements outside: from the cold and the heat – and they should do so with a minimal outlay of supplemental energy. Homes also need to be adequately and safely serviced in terms of essential amenities – people need safe sources of heat for cooking, and they need clean electricity for appliances. People need spaces of privacy.
Moreover, the homes in which we live help us to establish meaning in the world. Part of that sense in which we experience inhabitation consists of our relationship to the materials used – be it stone, clay or wood; steel, glass or plastic.
The sheer variety of housing forms around the world and in history, writes Arjun Appadurai, “underscores the intimate connections between family life, design, cosmology and the social imagination”. What is more, “these connections do not require wealth, stability or security to achieve their force”.
However, poverty, political instability, and insecurity, can certainly undermine all of that. Housing, in many respects, has become a battlefront against the working class and peasant communities, globally. We see that in Nigeria.
Most of the crucial physical aspects of habitation are recognised in international law as essential human rights: part of a Right to Adequate Housing, codified in Article 25 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Article 11.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966).
The associated guidance for those agreements also contains a provision on habitability, which includes that everyone have adequate living space, though how much that means is not specified.
How much space does someone need to live? How much space do Nigerians presently have? How many homes are there in Nigeria?
In my previous pamphlet, I looked at estimates of the present scale of building floor areas worldwide.[1]
From the available data, published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and by the Building Energy Research Centre of Tsinghua University in China, I estimated that the average domestic floor area across Africa as a whole presently stands at about 17 square metres (m2) per person,[2] although it is unclear whether that figure would include slum housing. Although Africa as a whole is not the same as Nigeria, and although this tells us very little about the social distribution of floor space, that number may be borne in mind.
A study of scenarios for human consumption up to 2050, by a team of earth systems scientists, led by Arnulf Grubler, used an estimate for living space in 2020 of 22m2 per person (including children) across the global south, and 30m2 in the global north.
That study, published in 2018, modelled global consumption metrics for 2020-2050 that would accord with a low-energy, “contraction and convergence” scenario for the world economy, with global warming limited to 1.5°C. Notwithstanding the fact that, in 2024, constraining global warming to 1.5°C seems increasingly – disastrously – unlikely, the modelling, and the suggested pathways of material consumption, remain highly salient.[3]
How many homes are there in Nigeria? The previous government, in its Energy Transition Plan (ETP) indicated that there were a total of 42 million homes in Nigeria in 2020,[4] when the population was about 208 million.
If the 42 million homes includes those of about 60 million urban slum dwellers, then that suggests about 5 people per home – which corresponds to 2020 survey data reported by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS).[5]
All people living in irregular housing – urban and rural – require new homes and related infrastructures.
Nigeria’s finance minister estimated, back in 2014, that slum occupancy and homelessness meant that about 17 million new housing units were needed. In 2023, the government estimated that the nationwide housing deficit had risen to 28 million units. Building those homes would require an estimated 21 trillion naira (₦21 trillion, equal last year to about US$ 27 billion). That amount is roughly 73% of the government’s approved budget for 2024.[6]
I can find no indication of what proportion of those 28 million homes would replace existing, inadequate homes, and what proportion would supplement existing homes to alleviate homelessness and over-occupancy.
The average urban household size in Nigeria is presently 4.5 people. Even if all of those 28 million new homes were to house only 3 people on average, then the implication is that 84 million people in Nigeria (37% of the population) presently lack adequate housing.
If the 28 million new homes were to house an average of 4 occupants, then that would represent 112 million people – roughly half the population.
Either way, a very large proportion of Nigeria’s population needs a new home at present.
In Lagos city, home to more than 7.25 million slum dwellers, according to the UN we can guess that something more than 1.6 million new homes are needed, to house those presently living in the city’s shanty towns. The state government says the housing deficit in Lagos State is about 3 million homes.[7]
So what of the future?
The “contraction and convergence” authors, Grubler et al, proposed 30m2 per person as a viable global average for 2050 – across the global north and south. That looks reasonable, for an equitable share in global floor areas.
The UN demographic forecast is for Nigeria’s population to hit about 380 million in 2050.
Let us assume that all future population growth is met with a sufficient number (and size) of homes to house urban and rural households at their current average sizes.
That would translate into around 38 million new homes across Nigeria by 2050, quite aside from the present housing deficit.[8]
Once you add in the present housing deficit, it suggests 66 million new homes constructed by 2050.
If we assume that each person in Nigeria (including children) needs 30m2 to live in, then the average floor area to house the average Nigerian household (5 people) would be 150m2.
If all newly constructed homes abided by this principle, then Nigeria’s growing population alone would require 4.5 billion m2 of additional residential floorspace. If the 28 million housing deficit were met, and housed people at a rate of 4 people per home, then that would require 3.4 billion m2 of floorspace.
The scale of the implied construction is enormous – but necessary.
Meanwhile, the forecast shift in urban/rural populations suggests that about 59 million homes need to be located in Nigeria’s urban areas alone in 2050 – two-and-a-half times the roughly 24 million urban homes in 2020.
Some proportion of urban “additions” will be homes that already exist in rural areas undergoing densification, and re-categorised from rural to urban. However, this also means that, while roughly 3 million additional homes will be needed in the countryside, many more than that will need to be built as the land considered to be “rural” shrinks in size.
All of these homes need to be climate resilient, and connected to essential amenities, including public transit.
When it comes to providing homes for those presently living in slums, informal settlements, or otherwise inadequate housing, one important thing to note is that slum clearance should be rejected.
The aim instead should be to maintain and support existing communities where they are – while bringing essential amenities and work into those communities. It is not the slums, but the slum-like conditions that need to be ameliorated, through what the UN-Habitat agency calls a “participatory slum upgrading approach”.
Urban restoration, of course, means much more than building homes. Homes require sanitation and other infrastructure.
Those living in the slums of Lagos that sit atop of water and across the city’s low-lying, flood-prone areas, are especially in need.
A total of 66 million new homes between 2025 and 2050 implies construction at a rate of 2.6 million new homes a year.[9]
How many homes are being built now?
Nationwide, housing production stood at only 100,000 new units per year in 2014, and has changed very little since.
Since 2016, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Works and Housing (FMWH) has undertaken to deliver 200,000 new housing units annually, funded primarily via private mortgages with the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria through a Cooperative Housing Loan Scheme and National Affordable Workers’ Housing Programme.
But in 2017-2021, just 8871 housing units were delivered by the FMWH, with a further 4652 anticipated for 2022. As of 2021, less than 100,000 units per year were funded by government – less than 4% of what is needed.
Still fewer completions apparently came from private housebuilders, although the government had sought 800,000 units to be provided by the private sector.
According to the president of the Association of Housing Corporations of Nigeria (AHCN), most state governments have sat on their hands when it comes to providing social housing via already-existing state housing corporations. Instead they have favoured Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), although those have produced few or no results.
A 2015 study already found that, just to bridge the existing housing gap, 1.5 million new homes would be required annually between 2012 and 2025. Plainly, those have utterly failed to materialise.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of new commercial homes are aimed at high-income households, instead of those most in need.
What of the quality of existing homes?
In Lagos, post-occupancy surveys have found that residents tend to be dissatisfied with the quality of mass public housing projects – and (no surprise) dissatisfaction is more pronounced among poorer residents (also see here).
According to evaluation undertaken in 2012, the physical conditions, design and build quality of housing, and of wider neighbourhood environments, were also found to be of a poor standard in 65% of assessed low-income housing, and in 35% of assessed middle-income housing.
All of those metrics need to be improved dramatically, if Nigerians are to enjoy a good quality of life.
The political economy of housebuilding
As mentioned above, the most recent estimate from the Nigerian government is that meeting the nationwide housing deficit will cost ₦21 trillion (2023 prices). That is about 73% the size of the approved federal budget for 2024.
Research on Nigeria by the IEA and Tsinghua University, that I mentioned above, gave estimates of floor area per person, in order to provide a baseline against which to measure projected future construction.
However, one argument often drawn from research of this sort is that enlarged populations are always and everywhere associated with enlarged economic demand, sufficient to pay for new homes to be built.[10]
Yet one can not simply assume that sufficient economic demand will materialise to provide for essential housing needs. “Urbanisation without growth” is commonplace: populations grow – inside and outside of cities – but real incomes are often in decline.[11]
The question in Nigeria, and in many other places, is instead whether sufficient economic activity, formal or informal, can be generated, to absorb a growing population that lacks any other non-market means of subsistence. More often than not, such populations totally lack the means to pay for new construction from out of their own pocket.
The influential architect Rem Koolhaas, in his writing on Lagos, notes that the city still retains – or at least it did twenty years ago:
huge housing projects and architectural complexes of a scale rarely seen in the resistant West. They are the historical city’s ‘gifts’ from other states – Israel, Czechoslovakia – that donated entire city sectors as aid or to stake some kind of now-defunct claim on Nigeria’s once fabled resources.
During the oil-rich 1970s, urban planning also turned towards fervent bouts of neighbourhood demolition, to carve highways over working class communities. Koolhaas explains that, in and around Lagos, this was led by a subsidiary of the German engineering firm Julius Berger.
Now, many of those structures are the physical infrastructure of some of Lagos’s greatest urban dysfunctionality – the basis of car dependence, and the habitual traffic “go-slows” that push the city’s productivity towards congestion and dissipation.
Nowadays, despite politicians’ sometimes fine words, no part of Nigerian government, at any level – whether national, state, or local – has taken effective action to meet the needs of the poor, who are in the majority. That is especially the case with regard to housing. Nigerian politicians care only about urban “development” insofar as it serves the elites.
The Nigerian writer AdĂ©wĂĄlĂ© MĂĄjĂ -Pearce charges the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing (FMWH) as, “a cash cow if ever there was one, by which I mean a cesspool of bribery and graft”.
Lagos State provides a particularly acute example. Despite all the evident pressures on land-use, and the difficulties imposed by the wetland environment, there remains sufficient buildable land to provide for the state’s housing needs. And yet, the government simply prioritises “urban development” for the 1%.[12]
Wherever existing slums are deemed to be situated on prime real estate, the neighbourhoods are demolished, their inhabitants threatened and moved on, and luxury developments built in their place.[13]
MĂĄjĂ -Pearce cites the “notorious” 1990 example of Maroko, a slum neighbourhood on Victoria Island. Evictions and demolitions were announced just a week in advance, over the radio.
“When the day arrived, women and girls were raped, property was looted, and an unknown number were killed in the ensuing mayhem.” Residents were told they would be rehoused in public housing, but nothing came of it.
Today, MakĂČko is called Victoria Island Extension, and the only poor to be seen are the servants employed in the mansions that have since sprung up.
Now, something similar seems to be brewing in MakĂČko, the “Venice of slums”, adjacent to downtown Lagos.
In 2020, residents were told, “there is going to be development and progress”. They “were given two options,” according to MĂĄjĂ -Pearce: “resettlement in another part of the city, or compensation for those with ‘valid documents to their property’.” This at a meeting closed to journalists, and in which community representatives were not even permitted to see the proposed plans.
Banana Island, an entire gated district of the city, and “the most expensive neighborhood in Nigeria”, is home to Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man (and owner of Nigeria’s new Dangote oil refinery), and president TinĂșbĂș, along with numerous celebrities.
Eko-Atlantic, presently under construction, is another neighbourhood planned as a closed enclave. According to MĂĄjĂ -Pearce, it:
will have its own private security, running water, and electricity, in a country famous for failing on all those fronts . . . As the ruling class well knows, the energy of frustrated youth must go somewhere, hence the excessive violence and the ever more elaborate self-contained communities.
Yet, Eko-Atlantic promises to provide “environmentally friendly housing” – for 250,000 people, or rather, for the “250,000 people with upwards of US$500,000 to shell out for an apartment (five times that for a house)”.[14]
The developers of both communities, the Lebanese Chagoury brothers (Gilbert and Ronald), are friends of president TinĂșbĂș, and the three share longstanding business interests. TinĂșbĂș granted the brothers’ Chagoury Group title to the land for Eko-Atlantic when he was governor of Lagos State.[15]
The brothers in turn formerly worked for Nigeria’s military dictator, Sani Abacha – responsible for the executions of nine Ogoni environmental activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, in 1995. Abacha was hugely corrupt, and under his rule the brothers prospered.[16]
The brothers are also notoriously close to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gilbert contributed to a voter registration committee for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1996, and as of 2008 was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation.[17]
Bill Clinton thanked the brothers, “by gracing the opening ceremony for Eko-Atlantic,” writes MĂĄjĂ -Pearce.[18]
In this elite context, it is worth noting a conversation between Rem Koolhaas and KunlĂ© AdĂ©yáșčmĂ, a Nigerian architect based in the Netherlands, acolyte of Koolhaas, and a former collaborator on the Lagos study in the late 1990s. When the two of them were interviewed by journalist Chris Michael for the Guardian in 2016, Michael asked them about Eko-Atlantic:
"To me,” mused AdĂ©yáșčmĂ, “Eko-Atlantic is a project that tried to address the second challenge Lagos faces – one is urbanisation, and the other is climate change. […] The idea in itself is really great."
But isn’t Eko-Atlantic “a form of social or climate apartheid?"
Rem Koolhaas: “It’s typical of our contemporary kind of world. […] You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.”
KunlĂ© AdĂ©yáșčmĂ: “The notion is to create a city to increase the economic opportunities, but I think that the real-estate values of a place like Eko-Atlantic is just really, really high. It’s a very ambitious project, and I think Lagos thinks to itself – or some of its leaders – oh, we deserve a place like Dubai.” [19]
Lagos as a whole has changed enormously since the 1990s, notes AdĂ©yáșčmĂ. Yet there remains a “polarity” in the city: “you see your next-door neighbour doing a lot better”.
On the plus side, “that diversity creates a tension to survive. […] The middle class was almost non-existent a long time ago, but now you find a lot more people going to museums, watching movies, going to parks – it’s becoming a more liveable city. […] it’s a place of opportunity for both intellectuals and cowboys, and I think that’s such a great idea.”
Plainly, Lagos and Nigeria require urban designers and politicians that think differently to this.
Private capital has been unwilling or incapable of providing the scale of housing that is needed.
The Nigerian state, and its local affiliates, have been similarly disinclined to fund the construction of homes – instead of that, directly evicting households to make way for new rounds of speculative investment.
Nor has any substantial intervention or funding come from international agencies and other governments.
These are not things to be passively observed, valorised or celebrated.
However, the state certainly could fund housebuilding and public housing on a large scale – given the political pressure and the administrative will. Funding from the Nigerian government can always be economically sustainable, if it uses Nigeria’s own domestic currency as means of payment. The only real “fiscal constraint” on spending is the capacity of the Nigerian economy to absorb that expenditure, through expanded production and consumption – without pushing on general inflation. That, and the requirement to avoid those moneys being lost to corruption or to pad corporate balance sheets.
When it comes to housing, the country will always have sufficient real demand, until all housing needs are met. It can meet that demand through a sufficient application of skilled labour, with sufficient materials available for purchase in the domestic currency.
Housebuilding is a labour-intensive processes. The Nigerian government could, at least, aim to use its domestic currency to pay for the labour costs of a mass housebuilding programme.
On the other hand, wherever materials do need to be sourced from abroad, foreign governments and international agencies should be providing assistance.
Just like the Nigerian government, foreign governments should be using their monetary resources to spend directly into their own economies in order to push real resources to where they are needed in the world.
They should initially provide the required materials, or sufficient currency to procure them – grants, not loans. But they should also be providing sufficient materials, machinery, and finance, so that many such materials can be produced within Nigeria itself.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently noted that, “about half of the increase in urban population through 2050 is forecasted to concentrate in eight countries” – in ranking order: India, China, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Indonesia, USA, Bangladesh.
Of those eight, the IPCC says that all but the USA will need significant levels of external funding assistance to build adequate homes, roads, and other urban infrastructure to cope with expected levels of urbanisation.
The UN-Habitat agency states:
The rate at which adequate/affordable housing is supplied and provided on the global market is way lower than the rate of urban population growth.
The message is clear: capitalist development on its present basis cannot hope to address the real needs of people for decent homes – let alone their needs for public buildings, and infrastructure. Nigeria’s political elites evince no inclination to change the apartheid status quo.
Non-market strategies for provisioning decent homes need to be found instead. Essential needs can be met directly, wherever the market is not providing – and without boosterish fantasies that it somehow will provide.
The AHCN wants the Nigerian government to establish a special development fund to pay for rental and affordable mass housing provision. Such a fund needs to be huge, and the targets for provision need to be ambitious, in order to have any hope of meeting essential needs in the years ahead.
The environmental and climate impact of housing construction and maintenance
The greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment are usually categorised as either “embodied” or “operational”.
The “embodied emissions” are those produced by the construction, maintenance, and eventual demolition of a building or piece of infrastructure. “Operational emissions” come from the use of a building or piece of infrastructure – for example, from the use of electricity or hot water.
The terms “embodied carbon” and “operational carbon” are also used, since the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment are carbon dioxide (CO2).[20]
In this part, I focus on embodied emissions. Household energy use, that produces “operational” emissions, is covered in the linked post, Nigeria: bringing energy to homes.
Most embodied emissions come from the materials used for buildings. The emissions associated with the in-situ construction process tend to be tiny by comparison.
Steel and cement are two of the most emissions-intensive construction materials globally. They are the materials of choice for cheap, profitable construction.[21]
Steel manufacture is a highly globalised process, with steel shipped out around the world from capital-intensive production sites.
Cement can be made in different ways, but it is usually made using limestone and clay, that go into an intermediary product called clinker. Concrete is made by combining cement, plus water and various additives, to aggregates such as sand, gravel and crushed stone. (Cement comprises 10-15% of concrete by mass.)
Cement is usually manufactured by large companies, nearby to where it is consumed. However, Africa as a whole, and West Africa in particular, have few cement plants, and most of the cement used there comes from outside. Consequently, cement can be up to three times more expensive in Africa than it is in European and North American markets. The economic case for cement therefore is not as strong in Africa as it tends to be elsewhere – and this itself is a political opening.[22]
One important additional consequence of the widespread use of concrete is that the construction sector globally is precipitating a sand crisis, “driving erosion, flooding, the salination of aquifers and the collapse of coastal defences”, according to the UN.
You can see a ranking of different materials’ embodied emissions – per cubic metre, or per kilo of weight – in this useful “materials pyramid”, published by the Centre for Industrialised Architecture at The Royal Danish Academy.
Estimates of the embodied emissions of Nigeria’s housing stock were presented in a 2017 study by the researcher Isidore Ezema and his colleagues. They examined a public housing unit in Lagos, taken to be representative of those built by Lagos State Government between 1981 and 2005 for low- and medium- income households.
The aim was to measure the total CO2 emissions associated with construction, maintenance, and eventual demolition – the sample building’s so-called whole life “embodied carbon”.[23] The authors set aside the “operational emissions” that come from building use – emissions from cooking, electricity, etc.
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| The researchers’ sample building. Source: Isidore Ezema et al(2017) |
This sample building comprised six apartments on three floors, with an overall floor area of 720m2. That’s 120m2 per 3-bedroom unit, inclusive of shared corridors and stairs.
The authors found that, assuming a life span of 50 years, the whole life embodied carbon of the building is approximately 589 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide per square metre (kgCO2/m2).
For comparison, in the UK, two leading benchmarks for embodied emissions in residential buildings specify that they should be less than 625 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide equivalent per square metre (kgCO2e/m2) (the Royal Institute of British Architects 2030 Climate Challenge), and less than 300 kgCO2e/m2 for domestic buildings over six storeys (the Low Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI)).
Current embodied emissions in the UK are typically around 1200 kgCO2e/m2.[24]
So, even in a society as fossil-dependent as Nigeria, the carbon intensity of housing construction is comparatively low, compared with Western norms.
The researchers in Lagos found that the energy used in construction-related transport and during construction itself were negligible, in line with global trends.
For the six-unit building, the total embodied emissions were 424 tonnes CO2e. Of that, 56% (about 239 tonnes CO2e) came from the construction materials, mostly cement, cement-based materials (such as concrete), and steel reinforcement.
A surprising 41% (about 175 tonnes CO2e) came from the lifetime maintenance of the building (“recurring” embodied carbon), around a third of which was due simply to a recurrent need for repainting.
What about the additional housing needed in Nigeria between now and 2050, as described in the previous section?
As mentioned, it is unclear what proportion of the present housing deficit (28 million homes) would replace existing homes, and what proportion would supplement existing homes to alleviate homelessness and over-occupancy.
If all of the new 28 million homes were to house only three people on average (compared to the average urban household size of 4.5 people), then they would provide housing for 84 million people (37% of the population). According to UN estimates, there will be 151 million additional residents of Nigeria by 2050.
If all necessary homes are provided, using similar construction techniques to those used in the sample building above, then the total embodied CO2 emissions would be at least 4 thousand million tonnes of CO2 (4Gt CO2).[25]
Putting that in context, the world’s total sociogenic greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 were 58 Gt CO2e. The world’s total “energy-related” buildings construction CO2 emissions for 2018 were 3.3 Gt CO2.
If construction were spread now over 25 years (2025-2050), then it would mean around 0.17 Gt CO2 per year of greenhouse gas emissions (170 Mt CO2).
That is more than half of Nigeria’s current annual territorial emissions, which were 376 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) in 2020, according to Climate Watch.
Clearly, less carbon-intensive buildings are needed. The possibilities are discussed in the linked post, Nigeria: towards sustainable homes for all.
In terms of wider environmental concerns, recall from part 1 how coastal flooding is becoming more severe in Nigeria due to climate change, while mangroves and other crucial wetland ecologies around Lagos are degraded.
The causes of those problems are man-made in more ways than one.
Adéwålé Måjà -Pearce writes about the terrible consequences of the construction of a breakwater near Lagos, built during the colonial period in order to protect the commercial harbour in Apapa:
The Apapa breakwater “interrupted the natural littoral drift that [had previously] deposited sand along the 100-mile Lagos coastline. The erosion [that followed construction] was rapid, despite the federal government’s efforts to turn back the tide, so to speak […] By the turn of the millennium, the ocean was spilling onto the highway that runs along the shoreline, threatening the offices and homes of the wealthy.”
Now, elite developments – Banana Island, Eko-Atlantic, and others – dredge from the seabed to reclaim land from the sea. In the case of Eko-Atlantic, its main stated aim, in engineering terms, is to provide a huge barrier against further erosion.
According to local fishing communities and activists, however, it has so far resulted in more severe (and deadly) tidal surges onto Lagos, along with permanent sea water inundations along the coast.
⏺ See also Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria, by Tom Ackers (a free, downloadable PDF), and linked posts: Nigeria: towards sustainable homes for all and Nigeria: bringing energy to homes
References
[1] See section 6.3, and Appendix 4 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview.
[2] See footnote 3 in section 6.3, ibid.
[3] See Arnulf Grubler et al (2018), A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 °C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies; see also the accompanying online database.
[4] Nigeria’s National Statistical Office put the number of households at 43.0 million in 2020, as reported here.
[5] According to the Nigeria Living Standards Survey 2020, “average household size in Nigeria is 5.06 persons per family: in rural areas the size is higher – 5.42 individuals versus 4.50 in urban areas.”
[6] The 28 million unit estimate and the ₦21 trillion estimate were stated by Vice President, Kashim Shettima, in September 2023. At that time, ₦21 trillion was equivalent to roughly US$ 27 billion. For more on the gap in housing provision, see here.
[7] If AdĂ©wĂĄlĂ© MĂĄjĂ -Pearce’s figure of more than 80% is correct, then that corresponds to 11.6 million people, which (at 4.50 people per home) implies around 2.6 million new homes.
[8] Author’s calculation, based on the UN’s projected scale of urban and rural populations, alongside present-day average urban and rural household sizes. The Buhari government’s ETP forecasts 70 million homes in 2050.
[9] According to analysis by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, the government’s 2022 (revised) National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIMP) suggests that 1.22 million new homes be provided annually, through to 2043. The government expects just 20% of these to be funded by the public sector.
[10] The IEA/TU thinking and methodology about their floor area forecasts are outlined in a joint report from 2015 (and also here and here). For more on their estimates, see my Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, section 6.3 footnote 3, and Appendix 4.
[11] The IEA/TU model appears to be vulnerable to the boosterish forecasting foibles of international agencies like the IMF, from which the IEA derives many of its economic forecasts. The “demographic dividend” forecast for Sub-Saharan Africa that I mentioned previously, is just one example.
[12] A picture paints a thousand words, in the case of the cover of Lagos State’s Climate Action Plan (no less!), which depicts a luxury marina.
[13] MĂĄjĂ -Pearce explains: “The amount of buildable land far outstrips the state’s housing needs, and [yet] the government itself seems invested only in the housing needs of the rich. The pattern, thus far, is to destroy existing housing to make way for more exclusive housing, which accommodates far fewer people at elitist prices.”.
[14] “Residents will even be able to avoid the city’s notoriously choked and potholed roads: private speedboats will be anchored along a six-mile-long promenade for quick getaways to the myriad beaches within easy distance – that is, before these beaches also succumb to the ocean.” See here.
[15] TinĂșbĂș’s national government is being legally challenged at the moment, over the award of a large highway construction project to a subsidiary of the Chagoury Group, without tender and in violation of procurement regulations. The highway is “the most expensive single project ever embarked upon by the Nigerian government”, and connects Eko-Atlantic to the oil-rich Niger Delta. Oluwaseyi TinĂșbĂș, son of president Bola TinĂșbĂș, and Ronald Chagoury Jr, son of Ronald Chagoury, co-owned an offshore company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.
[16] Gilbert Chagoury, for example, received development deals and oil franchises, according to the Los Angeles Times. He was convicted in Switzerland in 2000 of having laundered money for Abacha.
[17] At which point, he had donated somewhere between $1 and $5 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
[18] According to 2016 reporting by the Los Angeles Times, the Chagoury brothers are, moreover, “a prominent example of the nexus between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the family’s Clinton Foundation”. The paper refers to potentially questionable lobbying of US State Department officials by an aide to Bill Clinton, concerning the location of a new US consulate on the Eko-Atlantic development. Construction of the new consulate broke ground in Eko-Atlantic in 2022.
[19] MĂĄjĂ -Pearce and others (including the Chagoury Group), call Eko-Atlantic the “Dubai of Africa” (see here, here). As noted before, Koolhaas compared Alaba International Electronics Market, in the late 1990s, to Dubai: “like Alaba, Dubai benefits from a branded, if unbridled, form of capitalism.”
[20] For more on embodied emissions, see Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, part 2.3 and part 7. For more on operational emissions, see, part 2.3 and part 9.
[21] Cement is used almost entirely in construction – buildings and infrastructure – where it is a key ingredient of concrete, as well as of most construction mortars and tarmac. The production of cement is responsible for about 3 Gt CO2 emissions annually – about 5% of all sociogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and about 8% of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry. About 52% of the iron and steel used globally goes into construction. That is responsible for about 1.9 Gt of CO2 emissions annually – about 3.2% of all sociogenic emissions.
[22] Cement only became widely used across Africa in the middle of the 20th century, and construction in African countries tended to adopt often ill-fitting European standards for using cement and concrete in buildings and infrastructure. The enormous Dangote Group, owner of the new oil refinery near Lagos, owns Dangote Cement, which (notwithstanding the above) is the largest cement manufacturing company in Africa, with subsidiaries in ten countries across the continent. In 2022, revenues from Dangote Cement comprised 75% of the Dangote Group’s total revenue ($5.4 billion), according to the company.
[23] The “embodied emissions” also include other greenhouse gases other than CO2. The vast majority of embodied emissions are CO2 emissions. For more on embodied emissions, see Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, part 2.3 and part 7
[24] CO2e stands for CO2-equivalent, so note that these benchmarks include other greenhouse gases besides CO2, though these tend to be very minor.
[25] That is, 589 kgCO2/m2 x 30m2 per person x 235 million people to be housed. The 235 million comprise at least 84 million people rehoused in meeting the 28 million unit housing deficit, plus 151 million additional residents of Nigeria in 2050. Ezema et al suggested that the Lagos building’s typology might be typical for what would be required to bridge the housing gap. At 120m2 for a 3-bedroom unit, it would correspond to 30m2 per person if four people lived there.
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