Perhaps it may be characteristic of some Nigerians to lay blames rather than supply constructive advice, when things tend to go wrong. This seems to have played out recently as the president “rolled out his housing plan”, and literally walked into a minefield of slamming. People have been slamming President Muhammadu Buhari for the statement he made regarding the housing debacle in Nigeria. The President had asked all the states under the leadership of his party, the All Progressive Congress (APC), to endeavour to jointly provide a total of 250,000 housing units annually, noting that the housing gap was about 16 million. He expects the federal government to add another 250,000 units leaving a short fall of 500,000, which according to him, we expect foreign and local investors to provide. The APC had promised to add one million housing units annually.
This column, for a number of reasons, does not share the views of the president’s bashers. I would attempt to give some insight that I consider helpful to this government’s housing plan, instead. First, I think the president’s bashers have focused on the subsidiary rather than the main issues. Their major concern has been that the president spoke only about APC states as though he was not concerned with non-APC states. Well, that may be an error but in my view, it is not as significant as to detract from the President’s desire to provide houses to Nigerians. The president has advisers who write what he reads, and I am aware he did not speak ex tempore. I worry more about those who prepare his Talking Points (if they do), on such important national issues.
I had in the past expressed doubts over the capacity of some of the arrow-heads of this administration, who appear not to be significantly sharper than the butts of the arrows. Presidents keep craftsmen who, not only write what the Presidents say to the public but also get them to understand what is written. And within the limits of time available to the Presidents, prepare them for effective delivery. Doing otherwise is to expose the high office of the president to ridicule, and that role is not for people who spend more time being grateful for the job than impacting the system.
Second, I think the critics also put the cart before the horse. Let us first have the 250,000 housing units a year in the 22 APC states. I will be surprised if the PDP states are waiting for Buhari to tell them what to do to return to their dream Aso Rock. Besides, if we had PDP states around for 16 years and we couldn’t get them to dent the housing deficit, then it is preposterous to battle the president for not telling them to build houses. Ok, on behalf of the President I hereby tell the PDP states to contribute the number of houses relative to the ratio of states they control. I guess that settles it? Truly, if we are lucky and this administration delivers the 500, 000 housing units, as against the one million promised during electioneering, then we should have started on a journey that could end in a substantial reduction of the housing gap in Nigeria.
The real subject of discussion in the president’s housing speech, in my view, should be the fact that his handlers failed in their job. First, they put the gaff on paper and made him read it. As I said that statement was not an Obiter Dicta
Second, they were not smart enough to know the gaff needed to be obliterated pronto. The president is not expected to give details of everything in his speech. I therefore did not bother so much that he did not highlight his strategy for delivering the houses in his speech. What I expected was that his handlers would immediately elaborate his position and let the public into some of the core strategies they intend to implement to achieve the goal.That would be an opportunity not only to blur the sharp edges of any apparent gaff, but also to show that they understand the keys to effective housing delivery that have worked elsewhere.
That key is that the private sector must be in the driver’s seat; not the passengers the president made them into. The Nigerian private sector has always been leading in the provision of houses in the country. The bulk of our housing stock has been held squarely by the informal sector. What is lacking is an incentive scheme that unearths, for housing development, the funds trapped in private hands.
To expect even the APC states, some of which are in arrears of salaries to provide 250,000 housing units a year is even close to a pipe dream. By that arithmetic each of the 22 states of APC is on the average expected to provide about11, 000 housing units. This, as the president rightly said, is a tall order for most states, including those that have been struggling with labour over the sack of civil servants on grounds of dwindling federal revenue inflow.
No meaningful housing stock will be delivered until we learn from those who have successfully housed their citizens. The idea of Housing Credit comes easily to mind, when housing development is in focus. The reality is that the Nigeria private sector is waiting to be incentivised to deliver housing. There are many great tax experts in this government. They should work around tax incentives in this area, including housing credits, to pull out huge funds from the organized private sector into the housing sector.
A housing credit system is implementable in Nigeria and is capable of helping to deliver substantial parts of the one million housing units, which the APC had promised, if properly packaged. There are also many other creative programmes that can be engineered around the Mortgage Refinance Corporation. The PDP government, despite all its short comings, did well to implement the establishment of the mortgage refinance company. While it was about 25 years late in coming, we are grateful it eventually came.
The original proposal for the establishment of a mortgage refinance institution came from Dr Chu S.P Okongwu, Babangida’s brilliant Minister of Planning, Finance, Budget and later Petroleum Resources, in the Policy Thrust of the 1991 Budget. Dr Okongwu and a high powered delegation of about seventy of the biggest Nigerian businessmen, women and corporations, led by Aare M.K. O Abiola, including Dr Sony Odogwu (Ide Ahaba), Alhaji Mohammed Indimi, Dr Edet Amana and some of the finest civil servants, spent 18 days in South-East Asia learning how big thinking is energised in government.
One of the programmes the team studied in Malaysia was the Federal Land Development Authority (FEDA) – the very successful agricultural programme of President Mahathir Mohammed, which effectively reversed the rural-urban migration in Malaysia, and the Malaysian mortgage refinance institution called KAGAMAS.
On return, the group made two recommendations: to establish Nigeria’s equivalent of FELDA, to deal with youth unemployment and rural-urban migration. The second was to establish a mortgage refinance institution to help mortgage lenders grow their portfolios and minimize risk. While the first recommendation materialized in the establishment of what was then the Nigerian Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), the second on mortgaged refinancing failed, even though the importance of such an institution continued to be recognized by all subsequent regimes. Finance and Economy Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala eventually actualized it.
Unfortunately, NALDA became a disaster. Firstly, none of us in the delegation who did the technical work, including Prof Idachaba, the agriculture expert who headed our team that drafted the NALDA decree, was allowed further input to NALDA, which became a cassava-planting programme for NYSC members to spend the time for which they had no alternative use. NALDA died quickly but FELDA continues to create the wonders we saw in Malaysia, with the famed Nigerian palm fruit, allegedly taken from here. We owe the president a duty of care to help him see the far-side of his housing programme.
Emeka Osuji
