**2.1 The National Housing Policy in Nigeria**

A number of programmes and policies have been articulated and presented in a bid to meet the housing challenges facing the built milieu in Nigeria. In this light, the first national policy on housing in Nigeria was launched in 1991 with the aim of providing housing for all Nigerians by the year 2000. The policy encountered major obstacles in the implementation process, and failed to achieve the expected effect on the social environment to provide decent housing for all in the target year of 2000. This is due to the deficiencies of the Primary Mortgage Institution (PMI) and the lack of access to land and the affordability of mortgage loans etc. as evidenced in the housing delivery programmes embarked upon by the government of Nigeria from the pre-independence era till the year 2000 which was a massive failure [18].

Given the significance of housing in the national economy and because of the inability of previous policies and programmes to efficiently resolve the logjam of housing problems in the country, there was need to practically review the 1991 National Housing Policy. "The draft policy was subjected to critical comments and inputs and the New National Housing Policy was published in the year 2006" (8 p 64). Therefore, the new National Housing Policy objectives amongst others are:


The 2006 housing policy did not live up to expectation because the imperfections of the 1978 land-use act on land administration process nationwide, this could not provide a panacea for the cost of housing construction amongst others as land was very expensive to buy. Again, a bid was made to revise the 2002 national housing policy in September 2011, with important evidences affecting the housing sector. The reason for revisiting the previous policy was to enable a revitalisation of the housing sector to enable it to serve as a panacea for effective socio-economic development.(National Housing Policy (NHP) [19], therefore, in 2012, a new national policy on housing was enacted to meet the challenges of housing delivery through more public private-partnership, encourage active participation of all the three tiers of government in the provision of housing, to reduce the cost of producing houses by promoting the use of locally made building materials and also to improve the quantity and quality of rural housing, amongst others [19].

As assessed in this chapter, the impact of the national housing policy and the government's resolve to provide housing for the Nigerian society traverse the numerous housing programmes implemented by the government. Here, various development programs have been launched under the NHP to provide housing that meets various income levels, from the lowest to the highest income levels. However, from the previous debates [7, 8, 20], it can be seen that there has been little success in achieving these policy goals. This is because of the diverse challenges faced, reasons for failure include; production costs, government changes, political influence, corruption, and shortage of skilled workers.
