The Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, on Thursday, advised state governments to enact laws to make mandatory monthly rent payments to make housing more available to Nigerian masses.
Fashola made the call at the 10th Meeting of the National Council on Lands, Housing and Urban Development in Ikeja, Lagos.
The theme of the meeting was ” Housing Development as a Catalyst for Job Creation , Social Inclusion and Economic Development,”
“We may not be able to make all people homeowners, but we can reduce the number of those who lack shelter or live on the edge every so often when rent is falling due.
“Why we may not get there immediately, this is an area of immense exclusion that we can remedy by legislative action at state level.
He said economic indicators showed that payment for a year or more in arrears affected affordability thereby increasing shelter gap, hence the need for legislation.
“So must governors and commissioners through executive bills,” Fashola said.
“We in government must consciously improve on the bureaucracy around granting of construction permits or planning approval by taking steps to reduce the number of people involved, introducing some level of automation, such as online submission of applications and reducing the cost of approval.
“We must see revenue in a more broader sense, such as reduced income for planning approval, and increased income from consequential construction like income tax of employees on site, and a broader land use charge from more houses built,” he said.
Fashola enumerated the benefits of planning to infrastructure development to boost economic viability of the sports, tourism and other critical sectors of the nations economy.
He advised land managers and town planners to build new settlements taking advantage of federal government’s roads and rail networks to develop new economic opportunities in various sectors.
He also urged states to harness the opportunities in tittle documentation to boost their internally generated revenue while making more land more available to attract investments to their states.
He also called for introduction of technology in land matters and urged policy makers to take some lessons from the Lagos State Government performing excellently in land transaction materrs.
