The Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) has called for a proper rethink of Nigeria’s mortgage financing framework and housing delivery styles in order to achieve more housing delivery.
Debola Osibogun, immediate past president and chairman of council, CIBN, made the call in her 2016 presidential valedictory address on “Rethinking Nigeria’s Mortgage Financing Policies for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness”.
She said serious action should be taken on the following: institutional/establishment/employer Financing, Public Private Partnership, deployment of Pension Funds for financing mortgages, promotion of the concept of Mutual Housing Associations, encouragement of subsidised cooperatives, facilitating the concept of building cooperatives, facilitating Mutual Housing Associations, mobilization of foreign private capital flows to co-finance housing infrastructure in the spirit of the South-South partnership on infrastructure and increase in the fiscal space through efficiency gains, can also be a veritable source of government funding at all levels, in funding housing delivery.
In her recommendations on enhancing housing delivery, she said it will be proper for governments and employers to act as guarantors for house owners, adding that government should also encourage the idea of collapsible or mobile houses as is done in other parts of the world.
She said there is the need to encourage commercial banks to get more involved in housing delivery. According to her, the idea of using direct labour, having the same house design along particular streets, reworking building regulations and buying building materials in bulk are possible cost reduction strategies that can result in the provision of affordable houses.
“Nigerian housing policy reforms have been confronted with the challenge of how to strike a delicate balance between market liberalization, government intervention and the financial mechanism in the housing delivery process so as to achieve the objective of providing decent and affordable housing for Nigerians”, she said.
Osibogun said a developed mortgage finance sector impacts economic growth by way of reducing the loan interest rate which in turn results in increased affordability of housing and with it, the possibility of increased savings on the part of individual households that can then be invested in other economic activities.
She noted that many banks and non-bank financial institutions as well as government institutions played significant roles in housing finance in Nigeria.
The key institutions include: the Central Bank of Nigeria, Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, Insurance Companies, Specialised Institutions, Sub-national Governments, Primary Mortgage Institutions and Cooperatives.
Nigeria’s housing policy has always emphasised that housing must be seen in the context of overall national development which includes: social development, the generation of employment opportunities,the geographical distribution of the population and the location of industrial, commercial and agricultural activities.
