Insecurity drives Kaduna residents from their homes and pushes up rents
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Repeated kidnappings and attacks around Kaduna metropolis are forcing residents to abandon their homes for rented apartments in the city, driving rents sharply higher and threatening the investments of low-income homeowners.
Repeated kidnappings and attacks in communities on the outskirts of Kaduna metropolis are forcing residents to abandon their homes for rented apartments in the city, driving up rents and threatening the investments of low-income homeowners, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.
From Baban Saura to Danhon II in Millennium City, residents who spent years building houses are increasingly choosing to relocate rather than risk abduction and ransom demands. Yakubu Dahiru, who abandoned his home in the Danhon II community for Malali, said he rented a self-contained apartment for N600,000. “The insecurity is no longer in the villages; the bandits are coming closer to us, and it is better to leave than to be abducted and then forced to sell the house to pay ransom,” he said.
The displacement has pushed up accommodation costs across the city. Estate agent Maiunguwa Ibrahim, who operates around Kurmin Mashi, Gwamna Road and Badiko, said rents for some three-bedroom apartments along Gwamna Road had risen from between N1.2 million and N1.5 million to between N3 million and N3.5 million. Estate surveyor Umar Mohammed attributed the increase to a shortage of available apartments amid the influx of residents fleeing insecure communities.
Residents in new layouts across Kaduna North, Kaduna South, Chikun and Igabi Local Government Areas are abandoning properties that, for more than a decade, provided affordable homeownership for lower-income earners who bought plots and gradually developed them. Saidu Hamza, a Danhono II resident who moved his family to Ilorin in Kwara State after an attack, said he had put his three-bedroom house with an adjoining two-bedroom apartment up for sale at an unfavourable price.
Recent incidents underscore the risk. Gunmen reportedly killed a man identified as Sikiru in Baban Saura and abducted his wife, their 14-year-old son and six other people; Hafsat and her son are still in captivity according to a family member. In Millennium City, a couple and their six-month-old daughter were abducted from Alrahus Estate on October 6, with the husband appealing for help in a viral video and the kidnappers demanding a N300 million ransom.
The Kaduna State Police Command said on Monday it had arrested 12 suspects, including eight suspected kidnappers and four alleged informants, in operations in Millennium City and Maraban Rido, and that the state government had released three additional armoured personnel carriers. The situation compounds Nigeria’s wider housing challenge: the World Bank’s Nigeria Affordable Housing Project 2018 estimated a national housing deficit of 17 million units and an annual requirement of about 700,000 units over 20 years.