How we plan to reduce housing deficit, by Ashafa

The Managing Director of Federal Housing Authority, Senator Gbenga Ashafa, has laid out plans to address housing deficit in the country.

Ashafa, who spoke at the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Family Homes Funds (FHF) in Abuja, said property developers will be hired to pilot the schemes.

“We have initiated strategic partnership with public sector players, such as state governments, Federal Road Maintenance Agency, and others to drive home the vision of delivering affordable homes for Nigerians,” he said.

He explained, “we are delighted to partner with FHF to provide 300,000 housing units. This will generate jobs to professionals, artisans, suppliers, and others.”

Ashafa continued, “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 at Bwari in Abuja.”
 
He said: “The FHA remains 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 social-economic in the country.”

Managing Director, FHF, Mr. Femi Adewole, said by the signing of the MOU, support would be given to FHA to drive a large-scale construction of houses. We are looking forward to more proposals in the built sector.”
 
“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.”

While revealing Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN’s) plans to commit N200 billion towards the execution of the projects, he disclosed that FHFL 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 added.

IN a related development, the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) have entered into partnership to resolve housing and road maintenance problems in the country.

The Managing Director, Nuruddeen Rafindadi, an engineer, disclosed this when his FHA counterpart, Ashafa and Executive Director (Business Development), Abdulmumin Jibrin paid a visit to the agency in Abuja.
 
Ashafa said the partnership would serve as a model to other agencies, saying that both agencies can compete with any construction company to deliver infrastructure.