SAM'S SENSE: Affordable housing markets - Obtaining by false pretence?

The Kenya Kwanza administration is now in its third year, with government officials claiming that 150,000 housing units are under construction.

Only that the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, which is the official government source of such information, puts that number at 54,319 housing units valued at Ksh.122.6 billion. That is up to December 2024. 

Is it possible that over the last five months, nearly 100,000 units have been commenced? Still, with a target of 200,000 units per year, that is a miss on the target. But that’s not the point tonight.

The Affordable Housing Agenda has entered into the markets.

You may recall that at the inception of the housing levy in 2023, government-allied politicians traversed the country popularizing the idea. And the plan was bigger than the houses.

And now, the government says that over 250,000 jobs have been created. At inception, the target was a minimum of 1 million jobs.

From houses to jobs, and now to markets. A moving target it may seem. 

Which takes us to the legal framework of the programme. Let’s begin with the Affordable Housing Act of 2024. A law whose objects are indicated as, “to give effect to Article 43, (1b) of the constitution – on the right to accessible and adequate housing and to reasonable standards of sanitation. 

The other objective is to impose the housing levy of 1.5 per cent on incomes, to facilitate the provision of affordable housing and institutional housing.

There is nowhere in that act that markets are mentioned. Not even trade centres.

Section 10 of the Act provides that the affordable housing fund would be used to provide funds for [among other things) the design, development and maintenance of associated social and physical infrastructure.

I have attempted to establish what social infrastructure is and what is physical infrastructure. There is nothing in it that suggests that markets are social of physical infrastructure associated with houses. Hospitals and schools would be social, NOT MARKETS.

You see, markets are centres of trade, making them economic, not social.

How then did the government settle on using the housing levy, a tax on employees, to build economic hubs? Taxing Kenyans a special levy claiming it’s meant for homes. Only to use it to build infrastructure that is a county government's function. 

A programme which is about housing, jobs, and now markets, what else is this programme about? Where is the accountability? 

At a time that there is no known credible information about the cost of putting up the homes or the markets; apart from the bureau of statistic’s data which would appear understated going by the political statistics: how will Kenyans know whether their housing levy is generating value for money or not? 

That’s my sense tonight.