Nigeria’s young and booming capital of Abuja, a place where I spent part of my formative years, is best described as a city of competitive hustling. Opportunities are available, but competition is high. For many young professionals and entrepreneurs, success depends heavily on networking, relationships, reputation, and persistence.

In this way, Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “Where the Wild Things Grow,” a Future Tense Fiction story set in a future Abuja, is familiar to me. The character of Tamara’s mother, the founder and visionary behind Living Homes, is not unlike some of the women in my family. She is focused and keen on instilling values of hard work and entrepreneurship, most especially in her daughter. She is also seeking to solve a societal ill by delivering high-quality, environmentally friendly housing in her fast-growing city.

Tamara’s mum, in other words, is a hustler in a city awash in real estate and property developers eager to meet an expanding population’s growing commercial infrastructure and housing needs. Abuja only became the capital of Nigeria in 1991, in a move from Lagos pursuant to a 1976 law. The city’s population has grown from roughly 19,000 in 1950 to more than 4 million today. Its rapid growth rate places it among the world’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas.

This rapid growth comes with several challenges, none more daunting than keeping up with housing demand. A mix of big property developers and scrappier “briefcase” developers—smaller-scale operators often lacking financial capacity, technical expertise, and project-development resources—jockey to meet this demand in a city with a distinctive entrepreneurial culture characterized by optimism, resilience, and a strong “can-do” mentality. Many of the “hustlers” you encounter operate with a deep conviction that their breakthrough is just around the corner. We go soon hammer, a popular Nigerian pidgin expression, captures the conviction well: Success and prosperity are within reach.

As the plot of “Where the Wild Things Grow” rolls on, Tamara is confronted with a growing (if belated) realization: Her mother faced daunting odds in bringing her vision for Living Homes to life and was forced to make compromises along the way. It’s difficult for Tamara to come to terms with how oblivious her mother may have been to the high costs of delivering quality homes that adhere to regulatory standards, especially in a market notorious for its growth-exacerbated high cost of living.

Challenges plague today’s housing industry in Abuja and Nigeria at large: Supply pales in the face of demand, large-scale developers are scarce, access to affordable financing is limited, and registries and records are scant, among other barriers. The country’s mortgage market, too, remains underdeveloped and extremely expensive for borrowers, with commercial loans boasting interest rates in the range of 20 to 30%.

Another key challenge in contemporary Nigeria, as well as in Ize-Iyamu’s story, is that of ensuring housing developments adhere to industry and regulatory standards. The nation doesn’t necessarily have a deficit of regulations on paper, but rather suffers from a failure to implement and enforce those standards. There are too few conscientious housing inspectors like Adetayo in the story, and too much scheming about how to get around officials or convince them to look the other way, as Tamara’s chief lieutenant John-Joseph seems to want to do.  

Regulatory shortfalls across Africa’s fast-growing housing markets can reveal themselves in the use of substandard materials, the prevalence of unlicensed professionals, and design and supervision gaps for new projects. In Nigeria, to be fair, the government is trying to improve the regulatory oversight of housing, while transitioning the industry from a public sector-led model to more of a value-chain approach that encompasses public investment alongside private capital. Some initiatives include the Renewed Hope Cities and Estates Program, which is a large-scale development of affordable housing across the states and Abuja. The Ministry of Finance Incorporated, the investment wing of Nigeria’s federal government, boasts a Real Estate Investment Fund, a major public-private housing finance initiative designed to provide long-term, relatively low-cost mortgage financing while also supporting developers through offtake guarantees.

Abuja in particular is distinctive from Lagos, Nairobi, and other fast-growing West African metropolises in that it was developed pursuant to a monumental, planned layout for a capital city. This offers some advantages, though more could be done to embrace green spaces and offer a mix of urban and natural experiences, something my current home of Nairobi does well. I have childhood memories of Abuja’s scorching, humid heat, exacerbated by the surrounding looming rock monoliths. Cities everywhere need to make better use of the environment to protect themselves from rising temperatures. 

As in the story, there’s a desire across African cities to build new housing developments that incorporate more green spaces, climate-responsive design, and green building standards. These approaches can improve quality of life in neighborhoods while generating tangible savings in water and energy consumption. Still, we haven’t fully embraced the idea that all housing needs to respond to and interact with its surrounding environment. Sustainability cannot remain a luxury, but must become a set of everyday practices, behaviors, and precepts for how communities design, build, manage, and use their homes and neighborhoods.

In the end, what Tamara’s mother did in compromising industry standards to deliver homes is both ethically and logistically fraught. But I would argue that Tamara’s unilateral decision to tear down the units was, too, a bit hasty. In Nigeria today, regulators and inspectors emphasize the need to ensure the structural soundness of buildings to avoid unexpected collapse. In the story, the presence of weeds does not necessarily mean that the housing models had suffered significant foundation failure or structural damage. I would have suggested leaving the next steps to structural engineers, who after investigating may have opted for localized foundation strengthening, underpinning, drainage improvements, or other remedial works short of demolition.

But perhaps for Tamara, the pain of her mother’s need to compromise on her dream simply proved too much. It was easier to tear it down and start again.