Dakar — For almost a decade, Dakar residents, pressurised by the continuously rising cost of rent have been saying: “We have reached the ultimate limit; it cannot reasonably go any higher”.

Year after year, the protests have been dismissed estate agents and the hard facts on the ground has been that prices are going higher and higher.

Monthly payments to greedy landlords have gone so high that it has become one of the heaviest burdens on the shoulders of residents of the Senegalese capital, also severely hit by the worldwide increase of the prices of basic commodities such as food and fuel.

Goes parallel

This increase in rent goes parallel with a similar increase in the price of land or any built property.

Very few are those who dare dream of acquiring their own house, an act which has become an even darker nightmare than renting.

The situation is so bad, that since October 2007, Mr Iba Der Thiam an MP and former minister and now Member of Parliament has taken the complaints to the National Assembly to address the crisis.

Finally and after months of pushing, a resolution was passed in July this year by the assembly to set up a commission to inquire into the crisis.

When defending his proposal, the MP did not hesitate to point fingers at what he called a shady “mafia”, profiteering from vulnerable citizens in need of a roof for themselves and their families to sleep.

The objective assigned to this commission at this stage is to find out “what is really going on” in the housing sector, who is doing what, and who is responsible for the price raise, and then... propose solutions.

This is a daunting task in a sector where wealthy investors, self appointed agents from the formal and informal sector, ruthless middle-men, keep accusing each other of being the cause of the problem.

When he first raised the idea to address the issue last year, Mr Thiam, was requesting an even more radical initiative from the government: to immediately make a decision “reducing by 25 per cent the cost of rentals in all Senegalese main and secondary cities. His suggestion was not heeded.

Meanwhile, in the humblest neighbourhoods, “it’s not rare to rent a small single room at FCFA 40 or 50,000 (Sh11,400 per month) or the most insignificant house or two bed room flat at 150,000 (Sh34,200)”, the MP said.

He added that these prices are not in line with the wages paid to workers in this country, where at least half of the population are considered as poor, and where the minimal legal salary is still less than $80.

For instance primary school teachers are paid more or less US$200 per month (Sh13,000) at the beginning of their career while their most senior colleagues, serving in a secondary school can get roughly between US$500 and 600 (Sh39,000) after years in the civil service.

These salaries are far below the cost of the smallest apartment in the business district, called “Le Pleateau” or in the affluent seafront neighbourhood of Almadies, and some of the decent but centrally located neighbourhoods of the capital, where monthly rentals can reach thousands of dollars, meaning 10 times or more the monthly pay of a senior civil servant or a private sector executive.

These were the prices Mr Thiam wanted to be cut down by 25 per cent in October 2007, which could have eased a little bit the citizens’ plight, but would still exclude the majority from decent and comfortable housing at a reasonable price.

It is because of this phenomenon of high rent everywhere in the Senegalese capital, new buildings are rising. Multiple-floored blocks of apartments have replaced all the old “villas”, as the simple houses are called here.

In the city centre and other neighbourhoods, luxurious buildings are replacing the former red-tiled colonial houses. Plots are being subdivided to make for more rooms.

“You can’t have in Paris the type of projects we have here, (in the French capital) they have built everything a century or two ago. Here, in Dakar we have a nation under construction”, Mr Abdoulaye Seck a former businessman in the telecom sector now active in real estate said in the July issue of a monthly business magazine Réussir.

In Dakar, returns on investments in the top range can go as high as 20 per cent in less than 10 years, an optimistic Seck said, dismissing the idea that the crisis which took place in the US housing sector can happen here.

Such positive expectations have turned everyone into an investor in the housing sector, inspiring years ago a retired university professor to coin a little catch phrase - which has become popular ever since - to name this new category of business people. He called them “les vendeurs de sommeil”, literally meaning the “sleep traders”!

In fact anyone with money is now investing in blocs of apartments and any young person with some energy and a bit of audacity can quickly convert himself or herself into an agent, registered or not.

This lack of regulation, combined with the Ivorian crisis which broke out in 2002 bringing in more expatriates from multinational and international organisations relocated in Dakar, are often cited as the main causes of the inflation noted in the housing sector, to the detriment of the nationals.

Furthermore, with poverty striking the rural areas, Dakar’s population has more than doubled in two decades, growing from one million in 1980 to 2.3 million at the beginning of this century, according to official sources.

Three million people

Other experts believe that Dakar may indeed be already hosting more than three million people, who represent almost one third of the total Senegalese population estimated at 11.6 million inhabitants.

Meanwhile, the opposition and trade-unions blame the current liberal government for abandoning the “social habitat” policies.

Through such programmes previous governments have built houses to be sold to civil servants and other low income categories at reasonable monthly instalments paid to government-controlled agencies which develop the land.

In 2006, President Abdoulaye Wade started a project on the outskirts of Dakar to relocate flood victims. But, this unfinished plan to build 4,000 houses has been criticised for being too little for the country’s needs and a simple response to circumstances brought about by a national disaster.

But the most serious criticism put to the government is the little attention it pays to the plight of ordinary citizens in such a vital area, prompting some to suspect that supporters of the government are among those investors benefitting from the trade.

Comparing the slowness of the process which finally gave birth to the parliamentary commission of inquiry to the rapidity with which the same national assembly examined and approved the government proposal to amend the constitution and allow an extension of the presidential mandate, some easily wondered: Where lies the priority for the parliamentarians and for the government?

Serve the executive

Are they sitting in the House to defend the concerns and needs of their constituencies and voters or to serve the executive? The question has been in everybody’s mind and was put to the assembly by a young minority MP, Cheikh Bamba Ndiaye.

Ultimately, this lack of sense of priorities has been reflected in the manner the nation welcomed the decision to finally address a crucial issue which was overshadowed by the debate over the legality or not of the extension of the presidential term, where it could have been one of the most acclaimed decisions by the current Parliament.