The Minister of Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, has disclosed that under the National Housing Programme (NHP), his ministry had completed over 2000 housing units across the country.
Fashola, who said houses as commodities ought to be delivered in partnership with the private sector with government providing policy direction, said under the programme about 5000 housing units were under construction.
The minister, who spoke in Abuja in an interview recently, said: “That is why we went into the National Housing Programme, it was to send a message to help define what type of houses Nigerians want, what type of houses they will live in.
“This came from the experience of the 1979 Shagari initiative. There was almost uniformity at the time of houses and it was not successful in some parts as it was in some other places. In some places it was successful and in others it was not successful because of some cultural barriers, some people didn’t even live in them.
“So we asked what went wrong and did a survey and that led to the design of bungalows and the condominiums we are building today. We have about 5000 units under construction, we have finished about 2,000 plus and again we are building in small phases.
“In some cases we are in phase 3, some cases phase 2, in some cases we have finished phase one and two and we are finishing the road network and water supply but very soon we will start the allocation process publicly. But that is just the National Housing Programme, it is one of our many interventions but it does not respond to everybody’s needs. There are people who want their own land, they don’t want houses built, so we are responding to those people through our site and service schemes,”
Fashola said the ministry was also building directly through its parastatal agencies, adding that the Federal Housing Authority had completed over 1000 units.
