Eight days. Three sessions. One working policy document that started with tenants, was tested by professionals and civil society, and on 23 June finally landed where it has to land if it’s ever going to mean anything: in front of the government departments and agencies that can actually make it law.
HipCity Innovation Centre closed out the Abuja Rent and Tenancy Reform Policy Review Discussion at the DE Silver Green Luxury Hotel in Gudu, bringing together the Department of Development Control, Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, the Legal Aid Council, the Federal Ministry of Youth Development, LACON, NYCON, the University of Abuja, and the FCDA Department of Mass Housing.
Executive Director Mr Bassey Bassey opened with findings that explain why this process exists in the first place. HipCity’s own research into a decade of government-led affordable housing schemes found a troubling pattern: commissioning ceremonies were public and celebrated, but what actually got delivered, and who actually benefited, rarely made it back to public record. Separate rent affordability testing across Abuja found young people and middle-income earners being priced out of formal housing entirely, pushed into informal settlements that government’s usual response is to demolish.
Dr Isola Muyideen Latifat, a senior lecturer at the University of Abuja, walked the room through the now-familiar but still startling comparison: Abuja tenants spending 40 to 60% of income on rent against Lagos’s 30 to 50%, both well above the 30% affordability benchmark. Advance rent demands stretching to two years. Agency fees clustering around 20%. She didn’t just present the problem, she presented a structure: five recommendations, each with a proposed government department to lead it, and she was sharp enough to flag her own document’s weak point on the spot, questioning why dispute resolution had been assigned to the FCT Women’s Secretariat when the FCT Social Development Secretariat looked, on her own assessment, like the better fit.
What followed wasn’t polite agreement. The Legal Aid Council pushed back hard on the dispute resolution proposal, warning that lawyers advising clients commercially will keep steering people toward court unless they’re genuinely built into the alternative process. A landlord-side voice in the room made the case that landlords who’ve sunk retirement savings into property deserve protection too, not just regulation. A community member described being handed a six-month eviction notice and pressured into signing an undertaking to vacate, a story that did more to justify the policy’s urgency than any statistic could.
Then came the part that matters most for anyone watching this from outside the room: ownership. After consensus that the policy itself is sound, participants worked through who should actually hold the document. The answer that emerged was the FCT Legal Secretariat, chosen specifically because it already has the developmental mandate and convening power to pull other agencies in without creating a brand-new bureaucracy. One participant, speaking from hard experience watching the FCT Youth Policy stall for years in a Minister’s office, pushed for a smarter routing strategy this time: engage the Secretariat’s director and mandate secretary directly, get the policy tabled at internal coordination meetings, and only then send it upward, correctly addressed, rather than dropping it cold on a minister’s desk and hoping.
The session then did something genuinely useful: a Political Economy Analysis, mapping out who benefits, who loses, and where resistance will come from before the policy meets any of it in practice. Tenants as the clear primary beneficiary. Government benefiting too, but only as a consequence of the policy working for citizens first, not before. Estate agents identified as the group most likely to resist, since registration and licensing closes off the unregulated inspection fees many currently rely on. Landlords sitting in an uncomfortable middle ground, gaining protection but losing some pricing freedom. And a candid acknowledgment that resistance might not only come from outside government, but from within it too, in the form of budget excuses and turf disputes.
Rather than waiting for the entire framework to clear ministerial process, participants agreed on quick wins that can start now: an interim Standard Operating Procedure for estate agents, developed by the Department of Mass Housing. Harmonisation of two existing dispute resolution proposals, one from Mass Housing, one from the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, due back from the Legal Secretariat within three weeks. A public awareness push that doesn’t need to wait for anything.Every agency in the room left with something specific to do, and a deadline to do it by. That’s the difference between a talk shop and a policy process, and HipCity Innovation Centre intends to hold every one of them to it.
