CBN’s planned N200bn for housing sector holds promise for low income home buyers

Though Babatunde Fashola, minister of works and housing, argues that government cannot deliver low cost houses to Nigerians because there are no low cost land and building materials anywhere, two federal government’s agencies are talking differently.

The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and Family Homes Funds (FHF), which are key agencies in the housing ministry, say they are determined to deliver affordable houses to low income home buyers.

Plans, according to the agencies, have been laid out to address housing deficit in the country estimated at 20 million units which requires the country to build about 200,000 houses annually for over a decade to come to bridge.

“We’re determined to ensure affordable housing units, ranging from one to four bedrooms for low and middle income earners. This will be possible because the government has more buildable land in the country,” Femi Adewole, managing director and chief executive of FHF, assured.

Adeoye who spoke at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with FHA in Abuja recently, explained that by signing the MOU, support would be given to FHA to drive a large-scale construction of houses, adding that they were looking forward to more proposals in the built sector.

He disclosed that with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN’s) planned N200 billion commitment towards the execution of housing projects, FHF would build 300,000 houses for low income earners.

“What we will do is to deploy funds to the sites handled by FHA for low-income earners. We will deliver one bedroom for N2 million, two bedrooms for N3.5million, and three room apartments at N3.7 million,” he promised.

On his part, Gbenga Ashafa, managing director of FHA, disclosed that the agency had initiated strategic partnership with public sector players, such as state governments, Federal Road Maintenance Agency, (FERMA) and others to drive home the vision of delivering affordable homes for Nigerians.

“We are delighted to partner with FHF to provide 300,000 housing units. This will generate jobs to professionals, artisans, suppliers, and others; we’ve kick-started the process towards electronic documentation and digitisation for better service delivery and the pact with FHF is for the construction and delivery of 1,000 homes in Abuja,” he disclosed

Ashafa assured that FHA remained committed to deploying robust partnership and collaboration with other private and public institutions to change, impact and grow the housing sector.

“This is to keep faith with the key ingredient of the agency’s mission statement, which is to promote housing delivery in sustainable settlement through partnerships and end-user driven initiatives as a catalyst for socio-economic development of the country,” he said.

In the same vein, FERMA and FHA have also entered into partnership to resolve housing and road maintenance problems in the country.

Nuruddeen Rafindadi, FERMA’s managing director, who disclosed this when Ashafa and Abdulmumin Jibrin, Executive Director, Business Development at FHA, paid a visit to the agency in Abuja.

Ashafa said the partnership would serve as a model to other agencies, saying that both agencies could compete with any construction company to deliver infrastructure.