Disturbed that past efforts to provide solutions have failed, a Lagos-based firm, RevolutionPlus Property Development Company has urged the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola to facilitate the amendment of the Land Use Act and create enabling environment for private developers to assist government in tackling the consistent problems of housing deficit in the country.
The Chief Executive Officer, RevolutionPlus Property Development Company, Bamidele Onalaja made the appeal in Lagos during the official commissioning of the estate company’s corporate head office in Ikeja, Lagos.
The RevolutionPlus House, located on Olufunmilayo Okikiolu, off Toyin Street in Ikeja Lagos is a magnificent one-storey building bought over by the company and reconstructed into a befitting office complex and fully branded in the RevolutionPlus corporate colours.
According to Onalaja, the issue of housing deficit in Nigeria dated back to as far as 1957 when the first white paper on housing deficit in Nigeria was released. He maintained that that despite successive administration’s policy to provide solutions to the problem, it keeps growing and has reached a staggering 19 million in figure.
“As Nigeria’s population keeps growing, especially urban settlements in terms of births and rural to urban migration, the demand for houses keep growing as well but without a commensurate response from the government at various levels. He therefore called on Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, who is the minister in charge of housing to champion the reform of the land use act, create enabling environment for Nigerians families to acquire houses of their own by liberalising the processes obtaining mortgage facilities at government owned mortgage institutions.
He explained that between 1985 to 1993, the Gen. Ibrahim Babangida initiated a policy called “housing for all by the year 2020”, which didn’t yield much as the houses, and if available at all, were unaffordable.
In his remarks, the Surveyor General of Lagos State, Mr. Olutomi Sangowanwa commended the company and other private investors in the housing sector for their intervention in the sector, adding that government alone, at any level, cannot meet the housing requirement of its citizen.
“ The government cannot take the land, acquire the land, compensate the people and build the houses and that that is why the banking sector too have keyed into the private sector driven revolution in the housing sector by providing mortgage facilities,” he said.
