The Housing Crisis

from All Africa

FOROYAA Newspaper (Serrekunda)

The people often talk about the high cost of food. Housing is hardly mentioned. However, housing is next to food and water in the hierarchy of needs. Without a safe and spacious house to live in life can be a bed of thorns. This is precisely the situation of many families today.

Some time ago, a woman who is extremely skilful and had been abroad with her husband, narrated her ordeal to Foroyaa. She was a prominent woman married to a prominent man during the earlier days of her life. Separation led to disintegration of family life. She struggled with the children until they grew up.

She makes soap, creams and other items to cope with the requirements of daily life. Her major problem was housing. She had to go and rent.

Sometime ago, the representative of the landlord started to find every excuse to remove all the tenants from the building. She could not understand why the man had suddenly become uncooperative. She fell ill and missed payment for one month and the man decided to take her to the Rent Tribunal to ask for her eviction.

She started to look for a place to move to since the person had developed an attitude which she had not been used to. She started to discover what was behind the action of the man when he developed the same attitude towards tenants who had not defaulted in the payment of their rent.

She discovered that the land lord wanted all of them to be evicted after receiving rent from them for years because his sister's family could no longer stay abroad and wanted them to take over the building after they, as tenants, had paid more than the cost of the building.

Instead of giving her time to find a place to move to the man hastily looked for an eviction order. To her surprise the forces came while she was still in her room and decided to throw her lifelong possessions out destroying many of her precious things. Neighbours quickly tried to help her to secure some of the things lying in the street. With tears rolling down her cheeks she wondered what she had done to deserve such brutal treatment. She had to go back to her congested family home to seek sanctuary and leave all her possession scattered in different houses of her neighbours.

Every time we talk to this woman she is complaining about pain near her heart and she mfinds it difficult to breathe with ease. She constantly calls to lament the humiliation she had undergone. She is questioning whether there is no law governing the removal of the property of a person from a building where she has paid rent for years.

She wants to know whether it is the law which says that such properties should be thrown into the street without concern as to whether they will be broken or destroyed. She claims that if the law does not protect the poor from losses then the law is a savage one.

The dilemma of this woman is what many poor families in the urban areas are faced with today. Most families do not have houses of their own. They rent one or two bedroom houses, which hardly have internal toilet facilities or a place to cook from. In most instances, they take bath and urinate at the back of their houses allowing the raw liquid waste to flow into the street.

It is not uncommon to find houses which are so congested that children sleep on the floor at night. Such children cannot be under mosquito nets. Hence they always fall ill with Malaria. Poverty is real for such families.

The unfortunate thing with the country is that there is too little effort devoted to solving the housing crisis. Instead of housing programmes developed for low income earners, public corporations are busy patronizing housing schemes which provide accommodation to those who can purchase a building for over a million dalasi.

The suffering of the poor is increasing and evictions are becoming rampant as middle income landlords, who live off their rent, become desperate and increase rents, while the poor find it difficult to pay rent.

Foroyaa will interview the necessary authorities to find out whether there are humane ways of evicting tenants who become even poorer as their life possessions are destroyed during the process.

A people centred government must have policies, programmes, projects and laws which ease the suffering of the people. Democracy gives the poor one key power to check the growth of their poverty, that is, the voting right. They are at liberty to exercise it to put in place governments whose policies programmes, projects and laws will seek to ease their suffering and enhance their protection.