Lagos State Commissioner for Housing, Moruf Akinderu Fatai has disclosed that the State Government is exploring various programmes to provide affordable housing for the citizens.
The Commissioner made the disclosure at the just concluded virtual Abuja International Housing Show during a special session dedicated to Nigeria’s Housing Commissioners to harp on the various ways their States are exploring to provide enabling environment for affordable housing to thrive.
While stating that housing is one of the government’s priorities, Fatai said the current programmes being used in providing affordable housing include rent home policy, mortgage system and outright sales.
He said “In Lagos State, for us housing is very very important and I must tell you that we have been doing a lot since the period of Alhaji Lateef Jakande. Lagos State happens to have the first ministry of housing in Nigeria that is to show that we understand that Lagos, because of its peculiar situation, we must provide housing for the citizens.
“In Lagos, since the inception of this administration, we have put a lot of effort making sure that we continue to bring in more people into the housing ladder. As we speak, we have various programmes; we have the rent home policy, we have the mortgage system, we also have outright sales for our housing scheme”.
He said the government is working assiduously to bring in more people to the housing ladder. “What we are trying to do here in Lagos is to make sure that you don’t have to have all the money in place before you get your house that is why I said we are bringing in more people into the housing ladder”.
In his presentation, Fatai stated that “Now, what we are also planning to do is that we want to have a Lagos housing policy which we are already working on with the ministry of economy planning.
“The idea is to have a housing fund that will include the public as far as the private fund will bring them together because as we speak the cost of the current fund is above 10%. Our intention is to bring it down to under 10%. We are also looking at both national and international to seek the opportunity out there.
“By the time you combine all these together, we are okay that we would be able to get cost of fund below 10%”.
The Commissioner averred that “We have various housing scheme everywhere around Lagos. As we speak we have over 40 building sites. We have the one that we do through budgeting allocation, these are subsidized housing scheme, as we speak we have over 4000 of them ongoing everywhere around Lagos in all the sectorial zones
“We want to replicate this everywhere but the only problem is that we don’t have much land in Lagos State so we are asking them to bring in the technology so that we can go vertical”.
Delineating on the development, Fatai said “What we do is that through budgetary allocation, we build houses. These houses are subsidized and these houses are houses that we take to our rent a home programme especially those ones in the outskirt of Lagos”.
He noted that the ministry is collaborating with private sector to deliver affordable housing. “We have also identified the fact that we cannot do it alone. We have been doing a lot of collaboration with the private sector. Recently with the help of the private sector we were able to deliver two housing scheme.
“What we do is that we collaborate with the private sector, we provide the land and we allow them to give us their ideas and we always want them to focus on the middle income earners as well as low income earners. We have about 33 sites development with the private sector.
He, however noted that “We have various challenges. The mortgage system as it is in Nigeria is a challenge for us and I am sure it is also a challenge everywhere but we are trying to tackle this through various means”.
