I have just watched a news piece on Channels TV 8 o’clock News Track today Dec. 31, 2016 on high rents in Abuja.
The chairman of the relevant senate committee, Dino Melaye, during the broadcast, informed Nigerians that they had come up with some sort of solution to the rent problem in Abuja.
The solution? Control by law!
Mr Melaye informed Nigerians that they had already submitted a bill aimed at controlling the house rents in Abuja to the appropriate authority.
My questions.
- Have they forgotten that similar measures had been put in place decades earlier?
- How successful were those measures? In other words, did they solve the problems they were intended to solve?
- Even if they were successful, were they sustainable? If not, why?
My take
The committee members should first find out why the situation is what it is today. It is certainly not as a result of lack of legislative control. My judgement is that it arose out of gross misjudgments of the planners of the capital city on its growth pattern.
Consider the following:
- The nation’s track record in implementing such laws as the ones the senate committee members are thinking of is far from impressive.
- Legislating against market forces has always created contradictions, distortions, waste of resources including time and eventually ending up in failure due partly to the inherent unsustainability component.
The direction of using a bill to control rents may just be another such waste. A more sustainable approach may be moderating the circumstance that sustains the unwanted situation. And one of such is injecting a measured amount of housing provision into the system at affordable rates. This will definitely force rent rates down. Government of course should be the one to do this.
A second level of action could be controlling the undue migration into the capital city by introducing discouraging programmes rather than legislating against it.
My humble submission!
More grease to the elbows of those who try to solve our housing problem.
