By: Momodou Justice Darboe
Several decades of underinvestment in social housing development by the successive governments continues to cause grinding housing crisis in the Greater Banjul Area (GBA) and the peri-urban Gambia, this medium can authoritatively report.
As the Gambia’s urban population growth continues to unmatchits investment in housing, housing insecurity has been deepening for the past several years with no apparent end in sight.
Rapid urbanization and suburbanization have seen rent prices jump astronomically in the past years as demand soared.
“A two-bedroom house in Serekunda and anywhere between Banjul and Brusubi now costs D7,000 or more,” one Gora Nyingexplained to this reporter when approached for a comment on the current cost-of-housing-crisis.
And he was right as investigation conducted by this medium revealed that the rent prices of a house of two bedrooms and a parlour in several parts of urban and peri-urban Gambia have been pegged at nothing less than D7000.
A single room could cost D5000, depending on the location and tenants may be lucky to get a room and parlour for D3,000, depending on the location.
Some rent services have been charging even more.
“This is a real crisis that our central and local governments have been ignoring. How can a poorly-paid civil servant afford this kind of money? Our leaders should feel our pains and groans,” housewife Salimatou Sallah stated when approached for her view on the cost-of-housing-crisis.
Meanwhile, it’s not only soaring rent prices alone that had been worrying many urban dwellers but cheap and immediate housing solutions also continued to elude them thanks to the present dispensation’s lack of investment in social housing.
The local governments have also been either doing a poor job or no work at all in delivering cheap housing solutions.
It has yet to be seen whether Minister Hamat Bah will make good on his promise of delivering 200,000 social housing units in a decade’s time.
Mayor Talib Bensouda of the Kanifing Municipality meantime no longer speaks about his campaign promise of investing in social housing.
“Thousands of Gambians are currently faced with inadequate and costly shelter issues and it seems nobody cares,” a civil servant, who insisted on anonymity, told this reporter.
