(Our Stand 50) —
Nigeria, blessed with a population of approximately 200 million persons, with majority residing in urban areas should be explained as a nation that has failed to exploit the benefits of population growth. Over past decades, the country has been experiencing a relatively high population growth, added with the rate of urbanization increasing daily.
Due to this rising rate of rural-urban migration, concerns over poor standards in housing quality and the lack in decent housing availability to accommodate many hoping to reside in urban areas call for great concern.
With the current housing shortage problems faced by increasing number of Nigerians, many are not living up to what should be termed the required minimum housing standards. Added with this, there is also limited access to infrastructures like electricity, portable water system, proper constructed roads, access to quality education in the area, well drilled drainage system, amongst other inadequacies.
Furthermore, consequent to the above mentioned, is poor living conditions that become the end result.
Sharp growth in population of any area without a corresponding development in infrastructural amenities leads to or produces many negatives in such areas.
As a result, situations where developers or private builders who construct houses for personal purposes, are compelled to provide most of these infrastructures which creates an atmosphere or scenario of informality, that is, infrastructures that are not uniformly constructed, making the environment to lack cohesion, it’s a growing trend today.
For instance, coming to the poor supply of electricity, the use of back-up power generating sets to curtail poor services gotten from the nation’s authorized power suppliers has become an increasingly noise pollution that affects the mental state of dwellers. For a long time now, despite the fact that it has produced creative developments, this disturbing trend has led to increasing demand for active energy through various means manufactured for both cooling and lighting.
If the government and other coming ones do not strive to act now, energy consumption in the country may become impossible, rather, difficult to contend with, in the future.
Also, coming to slum areas that are known as informal settlements, there are sights of poorly constructed drainage systems done at the front of structures built by private persons for family purposes.
These are done was a way of curtailing the troubling effects of erosion. In light of this, where a structure(s) is yet to be erected on some empty lands, entails that there won’t be any drainage constructed the owner(s) are yet to construct houses on them. This takes us back to lack of uniformity in this particular form of infrastructure – drainage system.
