The upper legislative chamber Thursday canvassed for the provision of affordable housing units for indigent Nigerians. It has, therefore, tasked its Committee on Housing to work out modalities with the various stakeholders in the National Housing Development sector to ensure the implementation of affordable housing for the poorest Nigerians.
This was sequel to the adoption of a motion on the “Urgent need to reform the Housing Policy and Mortgage Financing in Nigeria to meet the escalating housing demand in the country”, moved by Senator Albert Akpan.
Moving the motion at plenary, Akpan said low and middle class income earners constitute the largest active population in Nigeria who finds it difficult to have access to housing in their lifetime.
According to him, the creation of the National Housing Fund through the National Housing Fund (NHF) Act of 1992 was specifically intended to cater for Nigerians in line with the various Housing policies and International Conventions and Treaties to which Nigeria is a signatory.
Akpan stated that by virtue of the provisions of the NHF Act, a working class Nigerian is required to contribute 2.5 percent of his or her monthly salary to the fund which provides the source of funding to the Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs).
He said, “access to the fund through the PMI is cumbersome due to stringent and complex eligibility criteria which makes the development of housing through the fund challenging or practically impossible to date.” “Since the creation of the fund in 1992, the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria as at 2013 disbursed only N100.5 billion. In 2015, out of four million registered contributors to the fund, only 60,000 (1.5%) were able to access mortgage loans through the funds, leading to the construction of only 40,653 houses across the country,” Akpan said.
Contributing to the motion, Senator Adenugba Fadahunsi called on the Federal Government to undertake an immediate overhaul of the country’s housing policies with a view to easing the burdens of poor Nigerians.
“There is need to reorganise the housing policy, so that it will benefit the whole of Nigerians as soon as possible,” he said.
Also on Thursday, the Senate urged President Buhari to initiate the process of computerising the nation’s oil sector.
This, according to the Senate, is to curb the multifaceted challenges associated with the oil and gas production, transportation, and sales business in the country.
It also mandated its joint committee on petroleum upstream, downstream and gas resources to convene a public hearing to ascertain the quantity of oil and gas produced daily and the quality control mechanism engaged by NNPC.
The committee is to also determine the amount of waste of petroleum products through pilfering, pipeline vandalisation and leakages, and international best practices of computerized oil and gas business management, including pipeline protection and quantity and quality control. These resolutions were reached after the Senate adopted a motion sponsored by Senator George Sekibo and 29 other Senators on the “need to instal computerized oil facilities management gadgets for Nigerian crude oil businesses.” Presenting the motion, Sekibo expressed concern that while other countries in the same business venture had gone digital since the past 50 years, Nigeria is still using analogue technology in doing its petroleum technology. “We still use human beings (4 persons) to monitor a kilometer of pipeline, giving undue opportunities to oil pilfered, giving rise to unnecessary pipeline explosion, causing deaths and unquantifiable loss of products and other human valuables,” he said.
According to him, petroleum products business should have been given priority attention in terms of protection, expansion, quantity and total quality control especially with oil as the mainstay of Nigeria’s income and foreign reserves.
Read Also: APC Governors Forum Rates Ganduje Best Performing Governor
While describing Nigeria as the biggest oil producer in Africa with maximum capacity of of about 2.5 million per barrel, the Senator however noted that, “this meager quantity is always under attack through pipeline vandalism and oil platform theft which has reduced quantity produced”.
Sekibo said: “one key area of fighting corruption is through effective management of resource itself, that is the source of revenue just as this administration emphasizes on the fight against revenue pilfering by the operators”.
“The computerization of oil management system assist in the pipeline protection, trigger off alarms when any section of the pipeline is disturbed for whatever reason. The system detects if there is a weak section, captures suspected intruders on the pipeline, and are equipped with fire fighting gadgets in the event of fire outbreak”.
Speaking shortly before the adoption of the motion, Senate President, Dr Ahmad Lawan, described the motion as ” genuine effort to ensure that we are not short changed as a country.”
THE GUARDIAN