It is no longer news that Senator Olugbenga Bareehu Ashafa is the new helmsman at the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). His appointment must have come as a big surprise because of the way the President replaced a Northerner with a Southerner, thus departing from what many have considered a divisive and unwholesome trend.
However,
what is really cheering in the appointment of Senator Ashafa to succeed the
former Managing Director of FHA, Professor Mohammed Al-Amin is that by tapping
the former 2-term elected representative of the Lagos East Senatorial District
for the FHA top job, President Buhari has undoubtedly chosen a tested and
accomplished top-drawer public administrator to drive the much needed
refocusing of a critical but underperforming
agency of the federal government. In achieving his deliverables on his
current assignment, Senator Ashafa should, in my opinion, shift the gaze of the
FHA firmly in the direction of government-provided public or social housing to
further cement his legacy as a formidable achiever.
The
FHA was established as a wholly owned agency of the Federal Government of
Nigeria vide Decree 40 of 1973 with a mandate to, among others, prepare and
submit “to government, from time to time, porposals for National Housing
Programmes” and to execute “ such housing programmes as may be approved by
Government.” Long before the FHA came into existence, there was the Federal
Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN), established as the Nigerian Building Society
(NBS) in 1956 and given its present name following the Indigenization Act of
1973. It was the first institutional initiative to provide long term credit
facilities for mortgage institutions in the country and to mobilize both
domestic and offshore funding into the housing sector. The FMBN also administers
the National Housing Fund (NHF) established by the NHF Act of 1992 – recently
replaced by the National Housing Fund (Establishment) Act of 2018 – to
essentially mobilize funds that will facilitate the provision of affordable
housing for Nigerians.
There
have been other institutional and legislative interventions to strengthen the
housing sector but the emphasis has rarely been on the provision affordable
housing for the poor and vulnerable as a deliberate part of the government’s
social policy. Take the FHA for example. It was created just 6 years before
journalism icon and politician, Alhaji Lateef
Jakande commenced a blistering mass housing programme that saw the
construction of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units for low and
middle income earners during his four-year tenure as Executive Governor of
Lagos State from 1979 to 1983. Since then, and in spite of numerous
institutional and legislative initiatives and promises, governments and the
real estate sector, including the FHA, have yet to deliver any truly successful
large scale mass housing projects in the country, with housing provisions
consistently falling far short of policy projections.
Mass
or social housing entails large scale provision of housing units, most often
wholly by government, or sometimes in partnership with the private sector, for
the public to acquire either on owner-occupier or rental basis. In our
situation, the implementation of mass housing should occur when governments
acquire lands in areas on the outskirts of heavily populated urban areas to
build home units numbering tens of thousands and in multiple places at any
point in time. Its main purpose is to enable households and families which are
unable to shoulder the heavy financial requirements needed to buy land and
build houses at prevailing market rates, to acquire decent homes at reasonably
reduced costs. That objective was apparently achieved in the short term by the
Jakande administration’s mass housing programme . Unfortunately, its long term
implementation and impact was truncated by the December 1983 military putsch.
Since
then, Nigeria’s urbanization rate has exploded, growing at an average of 4,3
percent annually, according to the World Bank and driven by uncontrolled
migration to the cities. On the contrary, the real estate sector, has practically stagnated in terms of its
contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment generation, and,
more importantly, provision of affordablel mass housing initiatives for the
ever-ballooning urban populace. Now, the country is saddled with an unenviable
housing deficit, which, at the last count in 2012, stood at 70 million home
units. To bridge the gap, the National
Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the nation requires the construction of 700,000
houses annually. That target is more than seven times the less than 100,000
units being constructed. Indeed, what we have witnessed in the past two decades
is the construction of between 300 to 500 home units in residential estates
located in high brow areas of our cities. These are homes that only high-income
or upper middle-income earners can afford while scant attention is paid to the
provision of decent and affordable housing for low-income earners and other
vulnerable members of the society.
Without
any doubt, the FHA and the real estate sector and even prospective homeowners
are beset with several challenges and difficulties which have continued to
stymie otherwise robust initiatives to successfully deliver affordable housing.
These, as identified by numerous commentators, include finance, politicization
of government legislation and requests, bureaucratic regulations, the nation’s
massive physical infrastructure deficit, unreliable data and statistics, lack
of transparency as well as shortage of skilled labour and high quality building
materials. As recently as November 2019, the Works Housing Minister, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN had
made a strident call for better collaboration between the Federal and State
governments to realize the objective of providing affordable housing for the
nation’s teeming urban population. In an address to the National Council on
Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Fashola
noted that land is the basic
requirement for building and owning a house and that land ownership and control
lie with the states. He added that the Supreme Court has also determined that
urban development and planning is within the jurisdiction of the states. It is
evident from the minister’s remarks that the deplorable and unpatriotic practice of denying federal
government’s requests for land for public housing in states not controlled by
the ruling party, still persists.
As
analysts have posited severally, the revised National Housing Fund Act passed
by the National Assembly on February 18th 2019 will, contrary to expectations,
make access to housing funds even more inaccessible to low income earners
because it taxes the poor more than the rich, especially when the respective
Pay As You Earn(PAYE) income tax requirements
are weighed against stipulated NHF deductions. Besides, the new Act imposed a
2.5 percent levy on cement which is tantamount to a tax on property development
– thus making housing even far less affordable for the poor and vulnerable…
In
spite of these and other formidable challenges, the FHA and the Federal
Ministry of Works and Housing, the authority’s supervising ministry, have
enunciated admirable plans and even executed some projects that may pass for
‘large” housing projects in parts of the
country , especially the Federal Capital Territory. But these have barely
scratched the surface of the national housing deficit. And, in almost all
cases, the homes constructed are anything but “affordable” to those who needed
affordable shelter the most : low income earners.
Former
FHA Managing Director/CEO, Professor Mohammed Al-Amin said in September 2018,
that the organization planned to invest a hefty N9 billion in the construction
of its Abuja Mass Housing Project of 550 units of houses. Al-Amin, who was
inpecting the half-completed project located at Zuba at the time, promised that
none of the “affordable houses” will be sold “above N5 million.” He was
optimistic that communities around the Zuba area, especially spare parts
dealers and other Nigerians who cannot afford rents in the heart of the FCT,
would be the “off-takers to access the housing units.” It is doubtful that a
550-unit housing scheme qualifies to be tagged as “mass.” The price tag too, is
prohibitive for the target public.
A
somewhat different tone was sounded by Al-Amin’s successor at the FHA in acting
capacity. The then Acting CEO of the authority, Mallam Umar Gonto was upbeat
when he informed the House of Representatives Committee on Housing and Habitat
in October last year that the FHA was on the verge of constructing 30,000
houses in Abuja Diaspora City on 750 hectares of land in Kabuzu-Maitama
District of the FCT. He disclosed that the FHA planned to replicate the “30000
pilot mass housing scheme” in all the six geopolitical zones of the country.
Since that project is most likely still on the drawing board till now, it would
be a decent and veritable take-off point for the FHA under Senator Ashafa to
reawaken the interest of federal and state governments as well as other
stakeholders in the housing delivery chain, to the urgent need for social
housing to provide decent and affordable homes for Nigerians, especially in the
urban areas where the housing deficit is more pronounced.
Other
interventions and initiatives which Senator Ashafa should work assiduously on
to bring to fruition to deliver mass housing are the Family Homes Fund, a
partnership between the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Nigerian Sovereign
Investment Authority and the proposed creation by the Central Bank of Nigeria
of the Nigerian Mortgage Guarantee Company (NMGC) as well as Mortgage Interest
Draw Back Fund. The Family Homes Fund has a commitment on paper to facilitate
and deliver 500,000 homes by 2023 while the CBN-backed organizations will
strengthen the institutional framework for mass housing financing and delivery.
Ashafa
has arrived at the FHA with a coveted track record of passion, diligence and
total commitment to the public good. He had, literally, cut his public service
teeth in the former Unified Local Government Service in Lagos State, when the
pace, efficiency and tradition of excellence set by the then Lagos City Council
(LCC) was the benchmark for municipal administration in the south of the
country. Then, unlike now, things worked in the third tier of government..
Diligently, Ashafa had learnt the intricacies of efficient and impactful local
government administration and delivery of services to the grassroots at the
foot of the masters such as Chief Rasheed Olu-Ajayi and Alhaji Babatunde
Rotinwa. The latter rose to become a Head of Service of Lagos State and is
currently Chairman of the state’s Local Government Service Commission.
By
the time he left the local government service after a decade in 1990, Ashafa
had held several key positions in the councils including area officer in charge
of departmental Tenders’ Board and the Finance and General Purposes Committee.
More importantly, he had mastered what it takes to serve the public
passionately and efficiently. This sturdy foundation had served him and Lagos
State well after he returned to public service through politics following a
stint in the private sector as an entrepreneur.
Senator
Ashafa’s sterling performance during his extended service as a political
appointee in Lagos State during the pacesetting tenures of Governors Asiwaju
Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, in land matters, urban
planning and housing, has been widely recognized and celebrated. He has also
drawn commendations for the purposeful and robust performance of his oversight
responsibilities as two-term Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Of
note is the vigour, tact and astute
leadership he demonstrated as Chairman of the Conference Committee of the Senate on the critical
Nigerian Railway Authority Bill, a piece of legislation which may ultimately
set the country’s infinitely problematic rail system on a sure-footed
trajectory of relevance and impact.
The
public will be banking on his exceptional competence and devotion to public
good, to deliver a “government-provided” social housing for the nation’s
teeming urban population.
By
Bolaji Akanni, a Lagos-based public commentator
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