Worried by shortage of affordable homes in the country , concerned stakeholders have called on the Federal Government to inject N500 billion into building 100,000 housing units across Nigeria.
According to them, government should apply the money to build 50,000 units in Lagos, 25,000 units in Port Harcourt, 15,000 units in Abuja and 10,000 housing units in Kano to revamp the economy.
This was coming as a response to the recent United Nations’ (UN) report, which rubbished the acclaimed Federal Government’s progress in the housing sector.
Canvassing big bang injection of N500 billion into the sector, Managing Director, Rock of Ages Investment, Mr. Francis Onwuemele, said the housing units should be completed in 15 months, while mortgage should be created for each.
Apart from the fact that the initiative would yield a minimum of 500,000 new jobs, Onwuemele proposed a mortgage payment of N600,000 per year or N50,000 per month, saying this would yield an inflow of N50 billion monthly.
He said: “This inflow (unlike the error in FESTAC) will be ploughed back monthly and immediately into another tranche of 100,000 housing units.
“In a year, you would have injected same N500 billion into achieving another 100,000 units of homes. By the third year, you would have created 200,000 mortgages and 200,000 mortgagors and easily rake in a monthly inflow of N100 billion or N1.2 trillion yearly with one million jobs created.”
If government adopted the strategy, he said that the multiplier effect by workers would be incredible, adding that the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) would move up rapidly and that crime rates would drop, while kidnapping would disappear.
Co-Founder, A-ZSME, Mr. John-Bede Anthonio, maintained that government must use Bonds with long-term tenure of 30-50 years from both local and international markets for affordable housing production.
He, however, warned that there must be transparency.
“Jakande, in 1980, took World Bank finance to execute all the low cost housing estates in Lagos and now the state government is about to finish the repayment. Prudent spending, not used for buying cars of 5.5 billion,” he said.
Anthonio, a former Managing Director of Lagos State Development and Property Corporation, urged government to put its house in order, decrying closure of border instead of removing subsidy of fuel.
Another housing professional, Okupe Adewunmi, said that if prices of houses were right, there would be effective demand, urging government on the need to help with infrastructure so that people could have better accessibility and productivity.
A report presented in Abuja by UN Special Rapporteur, Ms. Leilani Farha, revealed that the country’s housing sector was in a precarious condition to the extent that government needed to immediately declare a national emergency in the sector.
The report said that the huge government budget for the sector had no commensurate impact on the lives of the population that needed shelter in the country.
Farha, who stated that she completed her 10-day long fact-finding visit to three Nigerian urban cities of Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt with utmost shock seeing the realities on ground, also noted that the prevalent inhumane conditions of poor informal settlement amounted to gross human rights violations.
She said: “Nigeria’s housing sector is in a complete crisis. There is no current national housing action plan or strategy. Coordination and communication between federal and state governments seem lacking. Private market housing is unaffordable for most, rental housing is scarce, requires tenant to have one to two year’s rent in advance and there is no rent control or caps.
Poor remuneration, high interest rate, collateral’s bottleneck, unfavourable conditions of loan’s repayment, short-term nature of money and high cost of housing units have been adduced among other factors low-income earners are not benefiting from mortgage.
Lagos’ Chairman of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP), Mr. Bisi Adedire, stated that apart from low-income nature of many Nigerians, stringent conditions attached to mortgage loans and collateral’s requirement were hard to comeby by low-come people.
“People cannot meet up with collateral requirement to guarantee their payment. Also the condition of payment is not favorable, couple with interest rate.”
Adedire explained further that high cost of houses was another obstacle, adding that workers in the informal sector were not captured by most mortgage institutions.
According to report from Festus Adebayo-led Abuja Housing Show, a major requirement for getting mortgage loan facility that would enable borrower to own a home was by having a good job with regular income, but that has become a challenge when people’s earning is low.
He said: “At N18,000 per month minimum wage, public sector workers cannot afford mortgage loan. Even with the yet to be implemented new minimum wage of N30,000, this class of people will not still be able to afford mortgage loan.
“Therefore, for many years to come, unless a drastic change occurs, homeownership through mortgage loan, will continue to elude workers who earn the national minimum wage.”
Sustaining the argument, Adebayo said it was based on the term of mortgage’s structure, which required not less than one third or 33.3 per cent of N30,000 per month.
Source: newtelegraphng
