Nigeria’s Vice President Yemi Osibanjo on Monday raised concerns that growing urban migrations could push the country’s hous-ing deficits to reach 23 million by the end of this decade if unchecked. But he has also reaffirmed his government’s earlier promises of delivering one million units annually to close the huge gap in the sector.
The Vice President said this at the BusinessDay Annual Real Estate Round-Table discussion held on Monday in Abuja.
Nigeria’s housing deficit cur-rently hovers between 17 and 20 million annually, but Osinbanjo said to bridge existing gap, the current administration would work closely with the private sector by utilising the strategy of social housing programmes to provide standard but affordable housing for Nigerians.
He said a major strategy of Buhari administration for dealing with the national housing challenge, and all other national challenges entail macroeconomic re-engineering for poverty eradication, food secrity and the provision of housing by intensive and extensive investments in these sectors.
The Vice President, how-ever, observed that the government cannot meet the kind of funding required for housing, saying “we will therefore work closely with the private sector to achieve our target of delivering a million housing units per year for residential housing university hostels as well as bar-racks for uninformed services nationwide,” the Vice President, represented at the event by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, said.He noted that the primary mortgage market has been revamped with forty-six Primary Mortgage Banks now recapitalised and licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria to operate with national and regional licences, respectively.
He noted that the private sector-led mortgage institu-tion, the Nigerian Mortgage Refinancing Company has also been created with the support of the World Bank to comple-ment the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria liquidity to the Housing sector.
“One positive development in making housing accessible to the middle class in Nigeria through lending is the guideline review by the Nigerian Pension Commission that allows a certain portion of an individual’s pension contribution to be applied for equity payment towards a mortgage facility,” he said.
Frank Aigbogun, publish-er/CEO, BusinessDay news-paper, earlier in his welcome address, emphasised on the craving of Nigerians to own decent homes while acknowledging that the challenge had provided opportunities for developers in housing sector as well as catalysts for stimulating growth and job creation.
“Let’s assume we are de-livering one million house per year, it will take an average of 14-25 million Nigerians to deliver; am not talking about the suppliers of the materials, you would be providing jobs for 14-25 million Nigerians every year, in this sector,” Aigbogun said. “The more we can provide decent and affordable housing for our people, the better we are as a nation increasing the stake for each and everyone of us as Nigerians.
The higher the stake, the more responsible we are. The better we do this, the bet-ter we dig out some of the roots of the security challenge confront-ing us as a people,” he said.
Meanwhile, experts at the summit advocated the declaration of a state of emergency in the Nigerian housing sector, saying there is need to tackle the funding challenges, huge skill gap and cut down inter-est rate in order to reposition it to play the needed role in economic development.“Nigeria as a country hasn’t built up to a million houses since 2010.
This is a call for concern, as we ought to look at our credit policies, and ensure that our monetary policies ensures easier lending from the banks in growing the housing sec-tor,” said Gimba Ya’u Kumo, managing director of Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria.
He suggested that the Federal Government on the urgency of recapitalising Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria to further attract low cost fund-ing from the capital market and offshore funding, while suggesting further a minimum recapitalisation of N250 billion.
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
