FHA Seeks States’ Partnership

The Managing Director, Federal Housing Authority (FHA), Prof. Mohammed Al-Amin, has called for partnership between the authority and state governments to ensure access to land for housing development.

Al-Amin made the call in an interview with newsmen in Abuja. The managing director noted that the Land Use Act of 1978 vested the ownership of land on state governors, hence the need to work with the state governments.
He said that FHA, as an agency of the Federal Government, had to solicit for land from the state governors before building houses for the citizenry.

“There is no special vehicle for the FHA; therefore, the authority goes as any other developer, pays compensation and does all the necessary things private developers do to get land.
“That is not helping matters because if we spend a lot of money in getting land and pay compensation, then other things are being added to the cost of the housing.

“We need partnership with governments at the state level particularly, where you give us land; you help us with infrastructure and we build the houses and allocate them to citizens of Nigeria in the states.”
In order to overcome the challenge, he said that the authority had started interacting with state governors and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The managing director said that the authority had designed 37 partnership blueprints for each state government and the FCT.
He said that the blueprints became imperative to show the state governors areas they could work together with the authority and to point out the problems and specific potential for each state and how to harness them.
“These are some of the things we have been doing to overcome the challenges; but the challenges are numerous.”
He further said that trying to compete in a market economy, driven by profit is a major challenge facing the authority.
“The global economy is being determined by market forces and market forces are driven by profit.

“And our system of housing provision is to take the interest of Nigerians at heart, to give them houses that are affordable, accessible and available.
“So, we have to break the jinx of the market-driven economy and come to a compromise where ordinary Nigerians can have houses.”

He further explained that the many unforeseeable challenges in the housing sector made housing delivery difficult in Nigeria.
According to him, a developer has to plan for such unforeseeable challenges so that he will be able to build houses that are qualitative at competitive prices.