The Group Managing Director of Copen Group, Surv. Ugochukwu Chime has charged housing sector stakeholders to work in synergy towards proffering housing solutions that are holistic, inclusive and encompassing.
Surv. Chime stated this while speaking as guest panellist during a recent webinar organized by the Housing Development Advocacy Network and themed: Works And Housing: The Future Prospects For Delivery Of Affordable Housing Post Covid-19.
He stated that that Nigeria’s housing challenges must be addressed in the context of the whole housing ecosystem and value chain rather than in a piecemeal approach as have been done before now.
“If we want to build houses for our people, and in the process lead them from poverty –because it is the quickest intervention in order to lead them out of poverty and create employment, we need to dimension the whole value chain, we need to look at the problem we have, we need to stop to stop using this as an escape route” he said.
According to him, rather than criticizing existing housing sector institutions and using their perceived failures to set up new institutions, stakeholders should work as a team in charting out a viable course of action towards proffering sustainable solutions to housing sector problems.
“If really we want to help our people and use the housing sector as a means of employment generation, what we ought to do will be simple. We sit down with the stakeholders like your committee did in 2012 and come up with a workable programme, but rather than doing what we have done in the last few years, what we do is that we criticize an institution, and use their perceived failure as a pretext to start up another institution. It happened with respect to FMBN- they said FMBN failed and they created NMRC, with double digit interest rate. They knew the fundamentals were not correct. And by early 2015, they wanted to sell the assets of FMBN. I stood my ground and said it must not happen because they represent the only aspiration part for Nigerians to home ownership” he said.
While commenting on what he perceived to be some of the problems within the housing ecosystem, Chime stated that “What we have to tell ourselves are as follows:- We have an institution that has been doing well called the Federal Mortgage Bank. Did we understand what their problem was? As at today, we have a major problem in the FMBN. They are creating equitable mortgages for Abuja and other places because FCT is unable to issue legal titles. Meanwhile No mortgage should exist on equitable interest, it must be on legal interest because when you want to convert and sell because of foreclosure or failure, you will have a major problem on your hand.
“So why don’t we sit down and dimension these problems in the housing eco-system and come up with a workable programme and thereafter insist that whoever occupies any position- whether Minister or private sector, there has to be a regulation that forbids you from driving recklessly across the part way and causing accidents as we have been having. And that is a very critical point of what we need to do, otherwise, the problem will continue to occur. We have sufficient leaders to hold them accountable”.
Furthermore, he explained that there is the need for players within the housing sector value chain to take their focus off the problems in the sector and look put for innovative solutions as government alone would not be able to set things in order within the sector.
“Why the private sector was called in 2002/2004 was because government failed. The Federal Housing Authority and the various state housing development corporations were meant to be the Social housing development agencies. We have to get away from failures and look at solutions. The solution is this- we are looking at this problem from a very narrow perspective. The issue is this, we don’t have the delivery mechanism.
“If I am made the Minister of Housing today, I will also fail because we are looking at it an isolationist level, rather than looking at the whole transaction dynamics and find out- who are the stakeholders, how can we effectively engage them, what do they need for them to play their roles effectively? And ask ourselves so many other questions like- do we have data?” he asserted.
The Copen boss however pointed out that there is the need for increased result-oriented advocacy from housing stakeholders and that government must be held accountable to their activities and how it affects the development of the housing sector.
“Through advocacy and social pressure, we have to hold people accountable for they are supposed to do. Otherwise, lawlessness will pervade in the land. As we are aware, the ministry or government is supposed to be an enabler and regulator to be an umpire, a referee to ensure that parties in the private sector or in any vale chain are doing what they are supposed. Unfortunately for us, the referee has become a player and that has compounded the issue, there is confusion we have to hold ourselves accountable.
“The government must be held accountable to know that bureaucracy, corruption and short term nature which causes the failure of government’s direct intervention has not been sorted out. And in so far it is not sorted out, it will still mess up future policies and they have to give us direct solutions to those things” he noted.
Chime who is the immediate past President of the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria, also delineated the role of state governments in creating a smoother terrain for housing sector player, stating that “The state government who are in charge of physical policies concerning land have a huge role to play. We have a model mortgage and foreclosure law, and we have approval processes residing in them, we are suggesting that for instance- the National building code must be domesticated in all the states, the Model Mortgage Foreclosure law that has been accepted by CBN, accepted by Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, must be domesticated on the various states.
“I have mentioned in various fora that if a state is not willing to create the enabling environment, we must stop giving construction and project loans to that particular state. That is the way to tell them that these loans are not meant to be thrown away, but they must be recycled the National housing ecosystem. They must make it possible for us to have proper foreclosure in case of default.
While recounting his experience as REDAN President, Chime said “In the case of REDAN, within my tenure 2015 to 2020, I decided that there are a lot of things that we got in 2010 that we have to implement. The first thing was to make sure that there is collaboration. That all parties in the various stakeholders’ institution in the transaction dynamics value chain must tell developers what they are expecting of them.
“We also collaborated with UNILAG center for housing studies to make sure that this new intervention area involving private sector people, we must tell them what they needed to do because some of them are not able to dimension the risk and provide mitigants for the risks that are in the value chain of what they are doing. They come from various areas as investors, but the skill set require is not in them and we started teaching them. The second area also is to make sure that we get an endorsement committee whereby we start the process of self-regulation while we are waiting for real estate industry bill to be passed.
“If you are a developer, we have set a standard, we got the construction industry professional groups into a committee with our members. They will now go round those projects and if they meet the standards that are expected of the professional groups, that project will be certified as being endorsed by REDAN- which therefore gives a sign to the public that this is the bad one and these are the good ones. That committee was put in place and is already working” he noted.
