F. Shelter production and improvement

1. Land management

The availability of land constitutes an important factor in shelter production or improvement. In Nigeria, the Land Use Decree has had both positive and negative impacts on shelter production. In some ways it has helped to curb land speculation. In the recent past, Government has allocated vast tracts of land to private development under special arrangements. Since land has become a limiting factor, it is offered as a government input to shelter production. Land, thus, becomes a kind of indirect subsidy.

The goal and objective of the Land Use and Settlement Development Policy in Nigeria has been to "ensure easy access to, and efficient utilization of land for public and private use and promote balanced regional development and growth". However, the noble objectives of the Land Use Decree are yet to be realized. The constraints include:

To achieve the goals and objectives mentioned above, the Government inaugurated a committee to look into the constraints. The review has gone through many stages and was, in early 1993, at the final stage where it is being given final touches by the Law Reform Commission for promulgation.

2. Infrastructure

The lack of infrastructural facilities is a serious constraint to shelter production. To attain the quantities of serviced land required, infrastructure needs to be provided at standards affordable for the target populations and providing agencies. Unfortunately, shelter-related infrastructure has not been given the priority it deserves in Nigeria until quite recently.

The financing mechanism of infrastructure provision has been exhaustively dealt with in an earlier section. In this section it is the physical relation of infrastructure to shelter production and improvement that is discussed. As table 4 clearly shows, the quality of the existing shelter stock in Nigeria is low, partly due to the low level of available infrastructural services. By the early 1980s, it became clear that although there were national programmes for the provision of shelter, there was no parallel infrastructure financing mechanism in the housing sector. Consequently, the idea of IDF was articulated and approved by the Federal Government, as a mechanism to assist the state and local governments in Nigeria to obtain long-term financial credit for identifying, appraising and cofinancing infrastructure investments. The objectives and types of infrastructure to be funded have been discussed earlier.

Table 4. Shelter quality in southern states of Nigeria

Measure	Urban	Rural
Buildings more than 24 years old	20.6	32.1
Buildings needing major repairs or dilapidated	21.3	40.8
Buildings without pipe borne water	24.7	75.9
Buildings without electricity supply	16.6	68.2
Buildings without W/C	68.0	87.8
Buildings without toilets	4.0	28.8
Buildings without surfaced access roads	63.4	n.a.

Source: FRN, 1982; Onibokun (ed.),1985.

The Government currently limits the aggregate size of IDF sub-project loans in any one state to a maximum of N10 million ($500,000), to spread the facilities to as many states as possible. Sub-projects are currently being executed in three states (Benue, Gongola and Ondo) while prioritization studies and sub-project preparations are taking place in a few other states (Akwa Ibom, Kano, Katsina and Niger).

The IDF programme is currently restricted to urban investments. Its overall size (a maximum of N40 million per state or N840 million nationwide), needs to be increased substantially. Nevertheless, the IDF programme is a welcome participatory strategy for the provision of infrastructure, which had hitherto depended almost entirely on irregular government budgetary allocations. Furthermore, its advantages are quite obvious. Table 5 illustrates a programme in which the public sector is playing a (generally) facilitating role, leaving the bulk of financing and, to some extent, management to private and external sources. Success with the initial projects may provide the encouragement needed to expand the programme in terms of financial scope and its national coverage.

3. Building materials and technology

Building materials and components constitute 50-60 per cent of the total cost of construction inputs in Nigeria. Consequently, this sub-sector cannot be left to develop haphazardly. To stem the current indiscriminate import of building materials, local capabilities and resources must be developed.

The rapid increase in the cost of basic building materials began after the civil war. Other major increases coincided with the Udoji award and the mismanagement of the economy since the beginning of the last civilian administration. During these periods, sharp rises were recorded for all categories of building material. The major causes of high construction are:

Nigeria should gradually and systematically develop appropriate capabilities to reduce construction costs and achieve self-sufficiency in the production of basic building-materials and components from local resources at affordable cost. The public sector has had a long-standing interest in building-materials production. Under the import-substitution policy of the first National Development Plan (1962-1968), the building-materials sub-sector was earmarked for action. Many government-sponsored building-materials factories were established at that time. Cement was the most popular of the materials in this regard, although factories for paints and roofing materials were established. The current policy of the public sector is to move away from direct production of building materials towards that of facilitation. The Government intends to expand the scale of building-materials production. To achieve this goal, the Government has decided to pursue the following strategies:

To expand the production of building materials, plans are underway to determine, on a continuous basis, the consumption pattern of basic building materials. Specifically it is intended to promote the establishment of cottage and small-scale industries to produce building materials and components from local sources, such as clay, brick, concrete products, timber etc. In addition to these measures the Government has decided to encourage, through fiscal measures, the expansion of those existing industries that produce building materials and components from local sources. Moreover, it intends to identify new local raw materials available for the manufacture of building materials. These measures will be successful if it is ensured that a substantial percentage of the construction inputs are local building materials and components.

To achieve these objectives of the new housing policy, the Government has decided to pursue the following strategies:

The capacity of the building industry to accept and adapt new technologies needs to be enhanced through technical assistance and incentives for innovation (UNCHS, 1990b). In Nigeria, the public sector's support for the development of appropriate construction techniques has been very low-keyed. Its impact upon the shelter-delivery system has been negligible. One of its bestknown efforts is the campaign to replace sandcrete/cement blocks with burnt bricks as the basic building material. This idea was based on the desire to utilize effectively the widely occurring clay soils required for the burnt-brick production. For a time, the use of such bricks was made a condition in all public-sector projects. Yet the campaign failed to "catch on" because of the limited supply of the product, high unit costs and scarcity of labour experienced in the use of bricks (Odimuko, 1990).

It is the intention of the public sector under the New Housing Policy to "develop appropriate technology to facilitate production and use of local building materials; encourage and support originality and creativity in housing projects' and make available to the public the products of such initiatives (FRN, 1990: 19).

As has been rightly observed,