FG to start rehabilitation of old facilities

The Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Ahmed Dangiwa, has disclosed that rehabilitation of the joint buildings of the Ministry of Works and Housing, which is located at Tafawa Balewa Square, would begin this year.

He disclosed this during a recent inspection of old facilities in Lagos State to be marked for rehabilitation.

He said, “In line with this, I assure you that the Ministry of Housing will provide all necessary support to ensure these facilities are fully upgraded. From the water supply to the electricity and sanitary conditions, as well as the furniture and equipment you use, we will start the process of improvements this year, and whatever is remaining in our budget for 2024 we will start utilising for this rehabilitation, and at the same time, the remaining we are going to put back in the 2025 budget.

“Also, I understand that the building is housing, apart from the Ministry of Housing; these buildings house up to 40 federal government agencies. We want to ensure that we upgrade the status and the living conditions of the environment. Secondly, I want to assure you that the federal government, under the Renewed Hope programme, which is embarking on Renewed Hope’s cities and estates in Lagos State, wants to ensure that the professionals in the field office are fully in charge of the supervision of these projects to make sure that we make all the necessary support to you to ensure that you visit the site and ensure that we have a very good project monitoring so that the developers give us the best money we can provide.

“Lastly, under our other empty buildings that we are having in Lagos, we want to put them back to use, in any collaborative manner, even under BPP. That’s why we know that under this controller’s office, we have professionals in the field environment. We have architects, engineers, quality surveyors, tester surveyors, valuers, and even builders that want to start using each other.”

He further noted that the ministry was planning on assessing and bringing out a schedule of accommodation for unoccupied buildings in Lagos State.

He added, “In the next few months that will come, we want to ensure that we change the face of most of these buildings and most of the federal government assets that were having Lagos, because to the state government, we are causing a lot of problems for them for leaving our buildings rehabilitated and also causing a lot of some security concerns. So, the best way the federal government can put its money to upgrade them is to go ahead and assess them and then put our money into the ones that we think we need to collaborate with. The private sector will do it.

The private sector will bring in their money, rehabilitate them, and upgrade them to a befitting status, and then later rent them out to the willing takers and then recoup their investments before returning them to the federal government. I think this is a better option for collaboration than we intend to do.

“We want to make sure that we assess and bring our schedule of accommodations for all our buildings that are unoccupied in Lagos. The ones that the federal government can come up with money to renovate, we’ll put them back through our budgetary allocation to renovate. The ones that we feel that we need to collaborate with the private sector, we will invite them under public tendering to express interest and put their money to upgrade these facilities and then put them to use by renting them out so that the investors can recoup their investment over time before they return it to the private sector.

“It is the best way to ensure that we preserve these buildings away from the miscreants that use the empty buildings to perpetrate crime. We are going to up to more than 12 facilities between today and Friday, within the next three days, and we are going to inspect them and assess them.”