By Musa Baba Adamu
The Senate Committee on Housing and Urban Development is partnering the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) to address the housing gaps in the country.
Chairman of the Committee, Sen. Aminu Tambuwal said this during an interactive session of the committee with the Managing Director of MOFI, Dr Armstrong Takang and his team held in Abuja yesterday.
Peoples Daily reports that MOFI was started by an Act of Parliament that dates back to 1959 and is a corporate entity that manages Federal Government’s corporate investments.
In his remarks, Tambuwal said that the N1 trillion likely to be accessed by MOFI would be injected into the housing sub-sector of the economy.
He said: “This is by no means a small target and is very important and I assume that members of this committee are willing and ready to partner with you for us to succeed”.
Tambuwal said that the interactive session was to understand MOFI’s contribution to the housing sector especially as it relates to its oversight of government’s investment such as the Federal Mortgage Bank (FMB).
In his presentation, the Managing Director of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated, Dr Takang, decried that Nigeria’s housing gap was estimated at 20 million units.
“The housing gap is over 20 million. But what is even more worrisome is the fact that we have less than 100, 000 active mortgages within the entire sector. And that’s a lot of money.
“And if you do not have a mortgage scheme, it clearly means that you’re not providing the financing structure for individuals to be able to own homes without having to pay for everything up front.
“And that creates a lot of challenges for the entire sector. It makes it difficult for developers to feel confident enough to mobilise investments to develop houses without being sure that they will be up-takers,” he said.
He added that MOFI was intervening at leveraging on its status, assets and position to raise financing at scale to inject into the sector, financing from both public sector and private sector.
“This is so that we can make that liquidity available to that sector, especially on the demand side and providing low-cost mortgages.
“We established MOFI Real Estate Investment Fund (MREIF) as a platform that would leverage on federal government’s resources and crowded private sector funds.
“So that we have a larger pool of funds available for the sector so we begin to address the challenges that we are facing, both on the demand side as well as the supply side.
“At the moment. We’re able to get the necessary approvals that are required to establish that fund through the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We have done that. And we established the fund, the initial part of it for N250 billion out of N1 trillion”.
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