By Perpetua Onuegbu
The Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Mr Ahmed Dangiwa says the Federal Government will no longer tolerate abandoned projects across the country.
Dangiwa, who said this during the familiarisation visit of project sites awarded in 2019, constructed by the government and its agencies in Abuja on Thursday, said that unserious developers and contractors would be edged out.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the projects inspected were the 1,250 units Estate, Jibi, FCT and a condominium of 24 units of flats, comprising 1, 2 and 3 bedroom flats also in FCT.
The minister said the attitude of developers abandoning project sites would no longer be tolerated and advised that every project site should be cleared of weeds.
“As of the moment, what we are telling most of the contractors is that we will no more tolerate any abandoned projects, we intend to recoup the investment done by the government earlier on.
“So all construction sites that have been abandoned, we are inviting all the developers to come and sit down with us and know the reason why they abandoned it.’’
He said that developers or contractors who did not have the managerial or financial capacity would be edged out while the serious ones would be brought in for constructions to take off.
Dangiwa said the aim was to ensure that Nigerians were better as there are millions of Nigerians that need the houses, adding, ‘’President Bola Tinubu is passionate about providing affordable houses for Nigerians.’’
He added that the action was one of the renewed efforts to ensure that all Nigerians could be accommodated with an affordable housing, high earn housing or social housing.
“We are here in Brains and Hammers Estate, funded by the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria; I think it’s one of the biggest estates (1,250 units) they have ever funded.
“The impression now is that the houses are almost fully completed and off-takers have been gotten, that is the most important thing and the houses look affordable to Nigerians since it has been taken by Nigerians.’’
Dangiwa commended the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) for upscaling its performance to ensure that it provided more of such affordable houses for Nigerians and that they were fully completed within time.
Speaking on challenge of variation of prices of materials that had affected the delivery time of the houses, Dangiwa advised the developers to engage FMBN that might have given them loans on reasons for the delay.
He gave an insight into the intention of government to house citizens of all categories of earning and said that the ministry would soon commence ground breaking for the renewed cities project.
“We are already on the supplementary budget, so within the couple of weeks, we will start ground breaking of some of the houses we intend to construct.
“We intend to construct six mega cities, Renewed Hope cities round the country, one in each geopolitical zone of the country and we intend to construct the Renewed Hope estates in the remaining 30 states of the federation.
“So depending on the regulatory outlay will we commence that construction.’’
Dangiwa added that Public-Private Partnership (PPP) with some of the developers who would provide funding would be engaged while the ministry would provide enabling environment for the project.
According to him, we have already gone far with that, in FCT we are thinking about 10,000 housing units because the off-takers are already on ground both the high earners, middle and low income earners.
Also, speaking at the inspection, the Managing Director, Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN), Mr Madu Hamman, the project financier, said the first phase of the project (Brains and Hammers Estate) would be ready for off-take by December.
According to Hamman, for the entire estate of 1250, the first phase of it which is 800 has been packaged while the delivery of the 450 units must be concluded as well.
‘’So the entire 1250 will be delivered; beyond that, we have the ministerial pilot housing scheme which is equally under the cluster 1 section,” he said.
NAN
