The Association of Housing Corporations of Nigeria has said that in the first quarter of 2018, it will begin a pilot scheme of the Home Ownership Off-takers Affordability Survey Data Base with the creation of a verifiable working database of about 1,000 workers per selected state. According to the AHCN, the development is targeted at addressing the issue of non-availability of a database for off-takers on real estate and mortgage information management, which constituted a major challenge to the development of mortgage system in Nigeria.
The association in a communiqué issued at the end of its national workshop at the 44th Annual General Meeting which was signed by its President, Muhammed Adamu, and Secretary, Olusola Martins, also called on the Federal Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria to provide a revolving housing fund and inject a minimum of 500 billion NGN into the real estate sector at a single digit interest to develop the housing sector. The association said it would take advantage of the $300bn World Bank fund for the Nigeria Housing Finance Programme of which only $120m was drawn by the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company to date, and called on all state governments to support their housing agencies to access the fund for the provision of housing for their citizens.
The communiqué read in part, “The workshop, therefore, reiterates its commitment to Public-Private Partnership and calls on the government to take appropriate steps to address, strengthen and embrace emerging partnership options for effective housing delivery of decent and affordable mass housing so as to promote effectiveness and profitability of housing agencies. We note the availability of various funding opportunities that abound in funding mass housing and resolve to partner with major actors in the housing sector such as the NMRC and the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria to draw out various strategies in exploring foreign investment and partnership windows with long-term tenure to expand the affordable housing market in Nigeria.”
The association also bemoaned what it termed the lackadaisical attitude of the different tiers of government to the National Housing Fund as opposed to what obtained when the policy was newly introduced, and said all outstanding contributions to the NHF should be remitted, while the statutory provisions of the National Housing Policy should be strictly enforced and applied as well as the sanctions embedded in the policy. It added, Some state governments have pulled out of the National Housing Fund, which will rob civil servants in such states of the inherent benefits of accessing mortgage loans through the NHF.
In light of the proposed housing development programme to be embarked upon by the association in all the states of the federation, we call on all states that have pulled out of the fund to return to provide opportunities for civil servants in such states to benefit from the fund.
Source: The Punch
