‘Nigeria requires N250trn to fund housing deficit

Nigeria will require more than N250 trillion to fund its housing deficit estimated at over 17 million, researchers and experts have disclosed. The fund, according to them, will be required for appropriate blending of sustainable mortgage market, development of local building materials and effective implementation of the public-private efforts in housing provision. They noted that the nation’s housing shortage would continue to increase if something concrete is not done to increase the stock.

One of the experts, a lecturer at the Department of Estate Surveying and Management, University of Lagos, Professor, Timothy Nubi, said that the lack of adequate long-term housing finance policy has continued to be a big challenge to housing delivery in Nigeria. Nubi, who spoke during the national workshop of the Association of Housing Corporation of Nigeria (AHCN), said finance has constituted the major constraint to mass housing delivery in Nigeria.

He added that this has manifested in escalating cost of building materials and huge cost involved in the provision of infrastructural development The lecturer said that a multiintegrated approach is required to reduce the accommodation shortages, adding that there must be a four-year target as a mechanism for phasing the provision of housing. He is of the opinion that the proposed National Housing Initiative (NHI) should focus on the delivery of high quality affordable housing to Nigerians of various income classes and social groups. This proposal, Nubi said, must anchor housing supply on regeneration rather than new build and “recognise the importance of a rental housing strategy”.

The regeneration plan, according to him, will cover slum regeneration and stock release schemes. He said: “Nigeria’s 36 state housing corporations, 774 Local Governments and over registered Co-operative societies are strongly presented as key ‘new entrants.” With this approach, he said state housing corporations, local governments and co-operatives would be enabled to support the housing delivery programme. Other experts called on the government to ease the process of acquisition of funds for cost-effective housing delivery in the country. They stated that the current situation whereby Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs) compete for funds with deposit money banks was unacceptable.

The experts urged the federal government to, as a matter of urgency, to make proper provision for PMIs to access funds for the housing subsector. They also advised on the need to adopt a Public- Private-Partnership approach of ensuring the preparation of thorough feasibility and viability studies that “will address among other things, the issues of affordability, value-for-money and risk transfers in order to achieve success.” They said: “The challenge of provision of mass housing should not be left solely in the hands of the government particularly with dwindling resources; government should strengthen the Public-Private-Partnership system for effective housing delivery in the country.”