For years, the people most affected by Abuja’s rent crisis have also been the people least consulted about how to fix it. On 16 June, HipCity Innovation Centre set out to change that.
At the DE Silver Green Luxury Hotel in Gudu, tenants and renters from across the Federal Capital Territory gathered for the first of three planned stakeholder sessions on rent and tenancy reform, a project HipCity has been building with foundation support over the past year.
Executive Director Mr Bassey Bassey opened the session with a reminder that rent pressure isn’t unique to Abuja. Lagos has had a tenancy law since 2011. Cross River’s governor has publicly barred unlicensed individuals from operating as house agents. Enugu has banned agency fees outright. Abuja, despite being Nigeria’s planned capital, has no comparable framework. The only relevant legislation on the books, the Premises and Recovery Act, dates from the 1990s and offers tenants almost no protection.
That gap is exactly what this process is trying to close. With Heinrich Böll Foundation backing, HipCity commissioned Dr Isola Muyideen, a senior lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Abuja, to compare tenancy regulation across Nigerian states and draft a policy for the FCT. The 16 June session put her findings directly in front of the tenants the policy is meant to protect.
The numbers Dr Muyideen shared were sobering. Where Lagos tenants typically pay six months to a year in advance, landlords in Abuja routinely demand one to three years upfront. Agency fees that sit around five to ten per cent in Lagos climb to ten, fifteen, even twenty per cent in Abuja, often with separate “inspection fees” charged every time a tenant is shown a new property. International guidance suggests rent shouldn’t exceed thirty per cent of income. Many Abuja tenants are spending forty to sixty per cent.
What followed wasn’t a lecture. Tenants pushed back, added balance, and shared lived experience the research alone couldn’t capture. There was sharp debate over caution fees, deposits collected “for damages” that often vanish even when no damage occurs. There was frustration over evictions with little or no notice, compared with the roughly six-month standard tenants associate with Lagos. There was a clear, repeated call for a dispute resolution body that doesn’t require dragging a landlord through the courts, a route most tenants simply can’t afford in time or money.
By the end of the session, participants had sharpened the draft policy considerably: a proposed cap on agency fees, a reciprocal obligation on landlords to maintain properties they rent out, explicit protection against discrimination for people with disabilities, single mothers, and other vulnerable groups, and a shared ambition that by 2030, rent in the FCT should be achievable within two months of the minimum wage.
This was step one of three. Professionals, civil society groups, and government will each get their turn to test and refine what tenants started building on 16 June. HipCity Innovation Centre is grateful to every participant who showed up and spoke honestly about what renting in Abuja actually costs them.
