Many of the federal housing estates built by the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari to bridge the country’s housing deficit are unoccupied and rotting away across states, investigations by Daily Trust on Sunday have revealed.
This is just as many civil servants are lamenting that the cost of the houses are unaffordable.
Successive governments in the country had pledged to provide affordable housing for low-income earners.
Available data put Nigeria’s housing deficit at 7 million units in 1991; 12 million in 2007; 14 million in 2010; 20 million in 2018 and 28 million in 2023.
- 12 years after, Rivers $400m monorail project remains abandoned
- Tinubu calls for peace in Africa, global trouble spots
The Buhari administration established the National Housing Programme (NHP), domiciled in the Ministry of Works and Housing, to deliver affordable houses to beneficiaries.
The contracts for the construction of different categories of housing units were awarded in 2016 to 542 contractors for a sum of N27.488 million per unit.
Of the 6,022 housing units billed for construction in 46 sites across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), 2,864 are said to have been completed; while others are at various stages of completion.
While performing the groundbreaking ceremony of the civil servants housing estate in Apo Extension, Abuja, under the Federal Integrated Staff Housing (FISH) programme, Buhari had promised to build 5,000 houses yearly in each state for public workers for three years.
Read more: https://dailytrust.com/federal-houses-built-under-buhari-rot-away-in-states/
