Finding a house in Lilongwe has become a nightmare, not only for people moving into the city but also for the residents. This is mainly due to the high rates of urbanisation the city is experiencing. There are other reasons that are fuelling the growth of the problem.
The reasons are numerous yet, the most pertinent one relates to the current Government’s decision to restore the capital city status to the City of Lilongwe, thus ensuring that all the Ministers and the President himself be operating from Capital Hill. This move alone meant that all the houses that were on the market were snapped up. Ordinary people like you and me started to compete with a landlord whose stature is government and that is no competition at all.
Following that, other companies like Zain have moved their headquarters to Lilongwe and their employees have to be guaranteed housing; they too compete for the house on the market and are able to support tenants who can manage 6 months upfront payments. International NGOs that were based in Blantyre like World Vision, Oxfam, and Habitat for Humanity have also moved to Lilongwe and this is also coupled by the growth of local NGOs (mostly headquartered in Lilongwe).
Over the past few years Malawi has had a few countries (France, Japan, and Iceland, amongst others) establishing their embassies and they are all based in Lilongwe, this is the same with several bi-lateral organisations who have also established offices in the capital. The growth of the economy has also created its own opportunities that have attracted entrepreneurs who are snapping up all the available homes and these include international citizens who now call Lilongwe home.
But that is just the demand side of the housing issue. Lilongwe City is a very young City having been declared as such in 1975, and has most of its suburbs and housing stock being developed in the 1970s and 80s under the stewardship of the Capital City Development Cooperation and the Malawi Housing Corporation. This is the time of the Area 18 ndidamanga fame and all the other recognisable suburbs were developed, and all this was done with the public servants in mind.
During this time, the Malawi Housing Cooperation and later the Lilongwe City Council was also opening up areas that are currently called the Traditional Housing Areas (THAs) where the poor could be housed at very low cost using traditional materials. Unfortunately, the pace of this kind of housing provision that was pub lic sector driven almost came to a halt in the late 1990’s when the Government embarked on the controversial home ownership scheme.
You might wonder why I’m calling it controversial. It’s because when Government decided to offload most of its housing stock to the sitting tenants, there was no programme whatsoever to go towards replacing such homes, thus supplying more homes into the market so as to meet demand. One might also say it’s not Government’s job to construct housing for its people. That is true; Government’s role is to facilitate the process. Unfortunately, the process of ensuring that serviced land is available to the populace has been very slow and when done, the job has been left halfway through, with people being allocated plots with neither roads nor any other essential service. This has not been conducive to the quick provision of housing that can meet the rising demand. A layman’s comparison of the housing status in the city of Lilongwe with that of Blantyre City, the number of suburbs in Blantyre is way more than that of Lilongwe yet the population is more or less the same.
There hasn’t been a paradigm shift on housing provision as we still expect a house to be on a plot. As land is finite, it is high time as a nation we started developing high rise buildings that will provide housing at a faster pace but also closer to the existing services. In the past few years, individuals have begun driving the process of house provision albeit at a very slow pace due to the challenges mainly revolving around failure to provide serviced land by the authorities especially the Department of Lands and the Malawi Housing Cooperation that have been tasked with providing land for the middle and high income bracket of the society. Before the astronomical rates of urbanisation, the Lilongwe City Council was ably providing plots to the poor in such areas as Chilinde, Area 25 amongst others and the poor were reached. With the high rates of urbanisation and demand for the plots by all sectors of the economy even the THA plots are now being invaded by the middle income (case in point being Area 25 Sector 3,). The people being ingenious as they are have also found ways of housing themselves and the solution has been found outside the formal housing areas and this is mainly in the outskirts of the city. This is working for both the rich and the poor. We now have slums for the poor and those for the rich in the City of Lilongwe and that has formed a ring around the city and for the rich the concentration is along the major highways especially the Lilongwe to Blantyre route and the Mchinji Road. In this area multi-million dollar homes have been constructed on mainly communal lands where the villagers in these areas have sold off their fields for very little only to realise that they sold the golden geese.
For the poor though, traditional areas like Mtandile, Mbayani, and Chinsapo remain popular for housing provision and the midhadhas in the THAs continue to provide housing for the multitudes.
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