Abuja real estate firm, Big Homes has commended the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Barr Nyesom Wike on ongoing infrastructural development in parts of city, saying Abuja has never witnessed such rapid development in such a short period since creation.
Managing Director of Big Homes, Mr Topsy Essien gave the commendation at the commissioning of a project, Aurora’s Court in Mabushi.
According to him, “I like what the FCT Minister, Wike is doing with regards to road construction and infrastructure. The masses are the highest beneficiaries because they are the ones plying these roads. We need roads to drive. This is commendable, I want the minister to also look into security of lives and properties.”
Speaking further, Essien used the occasion to call on the minister and community leaders to address the cost of lands in the FCT, stressing that the high cost of lands has become the major challenge developers are facing in the push to provide affordable housing for Nigerians.
He said: “First, we need long-term strategies to provide affordable accommodation to Nigerians. Whatever a house costs, be it N2 million, N10 million, N100 million or N500 million, we should be able to have a financial system that gives us 20 to 30 years to pay for those kind of homes.
“Mortgages don’t just favour everyone. Some people cannot meet some of those standards. We have to bring those standards low. The most important thing is a kind of subsidy that will come in form of land. To be honest, I know people that were allocated lands for free. They didn’t pay any money. They just paid maybe N100,000 for a land. Now they want to sell it for N1 billion naira. They didn’t work for it.
“So why don’t government allocate lands to developers and say, build these kind of houses or units of housing? The cost of land is the most expensive thing when it comes to construction. It takes over 50 per cent of the cost of construction. So why don’t government say ‘take this land build 2,000 homes. The actual cost of land might be N1 billion, N2 billion, N10 billion, but we’ll make it like 10 per cent very affordable for you. Get this land, but build a certain number of units.’ If they do that, trust me, everyone will be able to own homes.
“We can do more in halving or solving housing deficit in Abuja and other parts of the country if we had the support of the government. Lands should be made available and affordable for developers to deliver homes to Nigerians to solve the accommodation issues.”
Speaking about the project, he said, “What we’re doing here today is the commissioning of one of our projects. Despite the challenges we go through and the way things are going, we’ve been able to find a way of working around and still deliver homes.
“Every two months, at least for the next six months, we should be able to commission more projects, because we’ll be commissioning three projects from now. We’ll just keep delivering projects because we have a community of business people, partners, landowners that are willing to come together to make things happen.”
