BREAKING NEWS, Business
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PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari on Monday, March 21, tasked the 22 states governed by the All Progressives Congress, APC, to build 250,000 housing units annually.
This, he said, Buhari said, would enable them to meet up with the election campaign promise of providing one million houses for Nigerians yearly.
The president who spoke at the opening session of the two-day National Economic Council, NEC, retreat on the economy at the old Banquet Hall, Abuja, also charged foreign investors and local construction companies to take part in the new effort to cover Nigeria’s housing deficit.
He said: “Some estimates put Nigeria’s housing deficit at about sixteen million units. In our successful campaign to win the general elections last year our party, the APC, promised to build a million housing units a year. This will turn out to be a very tall order unless the federal government builds 250,000 units. The 22 APC states together manage another two hundred and fifty thousand units.”
Buhari listed the challenges in the housing sector to include severe shortage of housing, high rents, unaffordable prices for prospective buyers especially middle and low-income earners.
“In addition, red tape, corruption and plain public service inefficiency lead to long delays in obtaining ownership of title documents. Again, there are no long term funding sources for mortgage purposes.
“These hurdles are by no means easy to scale, but we must find solutions to the housing deficit. This Retreat might start by looking at the laws,” he said.
The president said the problems facing manufacturing in Nigeria to include inadequate infrastructure such as power, roads, security “leading to increase in costs of making Made-in Nigeria goods pricier than imports, high cost of borrowing money.”
He said his administration would commence a fresh campaign to encourage Nigerians to patronise made-in-Nigeria goods and stating: “Example: all uniforms in government-sponsored institutions should be sourced from local factories.”
On Labour, he said: “We need to protect our workers from exploitation, but unions must cooperate with entrepreneurs to substantially improve productivity and quality of products if we are to move forward.”
The two-day retreat is to generate immediate, medium and long-term viable policy solutions to the economic challenges facing us at both the federal and state levels.
In his welcome address, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who is the chairman of the NEC, said that the retreat was organised to address the problems created by over-reliance on oil. At the retreat were state governors, ministers and other stakeholders.
— Mar 21, 2016 @ 15:30 GMT
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