The City Nigeria Never Built (Series 3): Real Solutions for Housing, Trust, and Urban Safety.

My heart goes out to the families in Benue, and to every Nigerian living through violence, eviction, or loss (not just of life, but of dignity). Because how do you plan for a future in a country where your address is not secure, your home not safe, your documents not trusted?

Reports show that between 150 and and 200 lives were lost when gunmen attacked Yelewata in June, destroying homes and livelihoods in minutes. What happened and keeps happening is not only a security failure. It is a failure of statehood, of urban governance, of vision. This has become a wound to our social fabric.

This is the Nigeria we live in: unsafe, disjointed, and built in a way that leaves too many behind. But it is not the Nigeria we have to accept.

Alone person walking through an unfinished urban neighborhood in Nigeria

A Quick Reminder

In Series 1, we took on the ruins, a housing system that has been hijacked by the ruling class, where policies claim to serve the people yet leave us with empty sky scrapers and big estates. In Series 2, we went outward; out for what others got right. We looked at cities committed to land reforms, social housing and governance.

Here in Series 3, we’re coming home. We invoke: What does the truly inclusive Nigerian city look like? Not the beautiful one in magazines, or the rendered one in videos. A real city where life’s lottery isn’t your right to shelter. Where an OAP, a teacher or a tailor can dream, build, and live securely. A city that embraces, safeguards, and honors its residents.

1. A City Where Trust Is Not Dead

Let us start with the elephant in the room: nobody trusts the system. And can you blame them? In Lagos alone, countless home seekers have fallen victim to fake agents. Sometimes five people pay for the same apartment. In 2022, the Lagos State Government had to demolish over 840 illegal structures. Behind those demolitions were real lives, savings, and heartbreaks.

Nigerians no longer trust developers. They don’t trust agents. They don’t even trust the government. That trust deficit is expensive. This is why landlords demand two years rent upfront, because no one trusts enforcement. It is why diaspora Nigerians hesitate to invest because they have heard too many stories of land sold twice or projects never completed. Some have become victims of a system that allows anyone to pose as an agent, developer, or middleman.

According to a report by the EFCC and corroborated by Nigeria Property Centre, over 15% of property fraud cases in Lagos stem from multiple allocations or sales of one property to several buyers.

The repercussion of this is that when trust dies, growth dies with it. But here’s the thing: trust can be rebuilt, and technology can help.

2. A City Where Titles Are Not Prayers

In Nigeria, getting a land title can feel like waiting for a miracle. Over 90% of land is unregistered, what does this imply? You cannot get a proper mortgage. You cannot build with peace of mind. You cannot prove ownership in court. So even when people build, they build in fear.

Can you paint a picture of a national, digitized land registry. Not the paper-pushing bureaucracy of today, but a transparent, blockchain-backed database that shows exactly who owns what?

Rwanda did it. Kenya did it. So why can’t we? None of these happened overnight. It was possible because the government prioritized it, state by state, and treated land data as infrastructure.

So what if Nigeria started with just one state? What if Lagos piloted a blockchain-backed land registry that linked with NIN and BVN, where buyers, banks, and developers could verify ownership instantly? This is no theory. It is very possible.

3. A City Where The Law Does Not Look Away

We know the stories. The man who spent ₦12 million on a home, only to arrive at the site and see a “New Owner” sign. The woman forced out of her home after two years because the landlord wanted new tenants who could pay more, with no legal consequences. Right now, we should not only ask for housing reform, we need legal protection.

A national agent registry: to operate, every real estate agent must register with a national body, be licensed, and display a traceable ID.
Mandatory use of escrow: buyers pay into a third-party account, not directly to the developer. Funds are only released based on actual construction milestones.
A real tenancy tribunal: landlords and tenants cannot keep settling matters with fists and frustration. We need small claims housing courts across zones, backed by simple online reporting systems.

And we must put an end to this growing madness of hidden fees: where a tenant’s rent is ₦700,000, but “lawyer’s agreement,” “commission,” “agency,” and “caution” fees add up to ₦950,000. In a just city, extra fees are regulated, disclosed upfront, and never exceed the rent itself.

4. A System Where Housing is Strategy

It is time we killed this dangerous myth: that housing for the masses is charity. Housing for the masses is strategy.

In Morocco, the government provided incentives and guarantees for private developers to build affordable homes. As a result, over 1.6 million units were delivered, and jobs were created across sectors from cement to carpentry, and across many artisans. Rather, in Nigeria, we keep outsourcing housing to luxury developers, then wonder why it is unaffordable.

An inclusive city uses housing to grow the economy, instead of inflating it.

This is how it can work:

Worker cooperatives can be legalized and scaled to co-own and build housing units.
State governments can offer low-cost land to developers who agree to build 50% of units below market rates.
Pension funds can safely invest in rental housing, with guaranteed returns tied to occupancy.

5. A City Built Around Jobs, Not Just Roads

In cities like Curitiba, Brazil, urban design was tied directly to transport and job accessibility, but right now, urban planning in Nigeria follows reverse logic; we build highways and estates, then wait for commerce to show up. But poor people cannot afford to wait. They migrate. They hustle. They suffer.

So, why not adopt Curitiba’s model in Nigeria?

Identify growth corridors: places where housing, markets, and small industries can co-exist.
Provide micro-infrastructure grants to communities to upgrade their own neighborhoods.
Bring back live-work zoning, where small businesses can legally operate from homes without harassment.

6. A City Where Communities Plan Together

Nigeria builds estates like it builds bridges: top-down, high-cost, low-consultation, yet the most successful urban models around the world, the UAE, Singapore have community-led planning at their core. Imagine if:

Local governments host quarterly planning forums with residents, traders, builders, transport operators.
New estates must allocate 15% of space for public good: schools, clinics, parks, markets, not just driveways.
Designs are vetted not just by architects, but by the people who will live there.

Try this in Lagos mainland or Nyanya in Abuja, where communities are already organizing around transport, security, and waste. Give them budget, data, tools and watch them build the city the government couldn’t. So, urban planning should not just be about engineers. It should be about people.

7. A City Where Cooperatives Actually Work

Nigeria’s informal workers (over 80% of the population) are locked out of the mortgage market. But what if they weren’t?

In Kenya, SACCOs (Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations) pool members’ funds to build affordable estates.

Nigeria can adapt it through:

Unions, churches, alumni groups, artisan cooperatives can register as housing collectives.
They contribute monthly, and the government matches it with subsidized land, infrastructure, and legal backing.

Developers are brought in and the houses are built at cost, and not just profit. This is already happening at small scale. It just needs structure, legislation, and protection.

8. A City That Understands Safety Starts with Design

Look again at the Benue killings. In 2024 alone, over 400 people were killed in the same state, due to comMillenniuml violence and land disputes. Entire villages wiped out, families displaced, land grabbed. This is not just about more patrol vans or military outposts. It is about settlements that are not hidden. Communities with lighting, address systems, vigilance, and visible government presence.

This Future Needs All of Us. This vision about the city we can still build is practical, but only if we are all at the table:

To Policymakers, write laws that unlock housing for every income bracket.

To Investors, stop waiting for perfect stability when you can help build it.

To Developers, your legacy will not be the number of estates you built, but the lives you dignified through them.

To The Media, tell the truth, the real one, not the PR version.

To Citizens, Demand more, do not subscribe to bribery and lobbying. Vote like your rent depends on it, because it does.

One Last Look

A silhouette illustration of Africans at sunrise, symbolizing hope and new beginnings.

So you see, the city Nigeria never built was never just about structures. It was about vision, power, and people; but the city Nigeria can build if we choose to, is one that works for all of us. A city where no one has to bribe agents just to find shelter. Where housing is a human right and safety comes from governance.

Nigeria has the land, the people, the demand, the capital, and painfully, the lessons. Now we must choose: hold onto broken systems or rebuild trust, brick by brick.

Let us start in Benue. Let us continue in Enugu. Let us not stop in Port Harcourt, Abuja, or Lagos. Let us reclaim trust across this nation. Because cities do not just rise, they are built by the choices we make. So I ask again: When your children walk through the city you helped build, will they see belonging, or just broken walls?

This is the city Nigeria must build!