NIQS President decries dearth of viable mortgages
By Jude Njoku
Worried by the housing shortfall put at a staggering 16 million units, the President of the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors, NIQS, Mr. Agele John Alufohai, has called on the Federal Government to develop a robust roadmap for developing the nation’s housing sector.
•Mr.-Agele-John-Alufohai
Mr. Alufohai who made this call in a paper titled Creating wealth and employment through affordable housing which he delivered at a symposium organised by the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria REDAN, in Abuja noted that a major impediment to meeting Nigeria’s housing need is not poverty but the lack of long-term mortgages.
“To my mind, the challenge of housing in Nigeria is not that people are too poor to build houses but the absence of long-term mortgages, the dominant instrument for procuring new houses in all developed and well-managed economies”, he said.
The NIQS President also criticised the National Housing Fund NHF, for providing subsidies on mortgages which supply houses to the rich while the poor housing conditions of the neediest Nigerians remained unattended.
His words: “The NHF’s policy of giving out subsidised mortgages at six percent results in the supply of N8-N10 million houses which the few rich end up buying. Assisting a tiny fraction of Nigerians who can afford long-term mortgages obtain it at extremely subsidised rates is not good for the vast majority of Nigerians in need of quality accommodation as well as the businesses of estate developers and quantity surveyors”.
He canvassed a refocus of government housing agencies as a major step towards addressing the housing challenge. Government agencies, he said, must focus on regulatory, planning and standards of enforcement roles rather than awarding contracts for construction of poorly-built houses which are often sited in unplanned neighbourhoods.
The NIQS boss then called on the government to encourage the emergence of major real estate developers that will deliver high quality projects and exploit economies of scale to provide cheaper houses for various categories of Nigerians. This, he said, will promote a self-financing real estate boom and enable the government eradicate slums through programmes which subsidize rents in buildings that are clearly meant for the poorest Nigerians.
Mr. Alufohai repeated his call for the abolition of the Land Use Act as part of the reform of the housing industry. In his words “every professional and analyst now regards the Land Use Act as a policy which has become an impediment to attracting investment and promoting growth in the sector.
It is therefore time to abolish the Act”. He said the repeal of the Act will be a major incentive to property developers and other investors in the sector.
