Lawmakers back N500bn annual housing budget

Federal lawmakers have expressed support for the plan to increase the housing ministry’s yearly budget to a minimum of N500bn, starting with the 2025 budget cycle, the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Musa Dangiwa, has said.

Dangiwa said this was following the ministry’s engagement with the National Assembly leadership while speaking at the 2024 Property and Environment Writers Association of Nigeria Conference in Lagos, themed, “Resolving Financial and Regulatory Challenges to Achieve the Renewed Hope Agenda in Housing”.

He said the development would allow the government to expand housing projects to cover the remaining 18 states and increase the unit counts per state from 250 to, at least, 500, as initially planned.

The minister, who was represented by the Director of Press and Public Relations at the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Salisu Haiba, said, “We need to build approximately 550,000 units yearly over the next decade to close this gap. This will require about N5.5tn yearly.

“We are funding 12 Renewed Hope Estates from the N50bn 2023 Supplementary Budget. We also have an additional N27.2bn allocated in the 2024 budget to complete their infrastructure fully, while awaiting the 2025 budget to expand the programme to cover more of the remaining states.

“The three Renewed Hope Cities in FCT, Lagos, and Kano are all being funded through a PPP that the ministry signed with a consortium of developers for the delivery of 100,000 housing units nationwide.

Under this strategy, the developers source land and construction finance, while the government creates an enabling environment for them to deliver housing.”

He noted that housing delivery, especially affordable housing, which the nation was in dire need of, required huge financing, adding that at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, “Estimates show that we will need to build 550,000 housing units yearly to cope with increasing population and address the housing deficit in the country, which some sources have said is over 18 million units.”

According to him, it will require a yearly budget of N5.5tn at an average of N10m per unit.

He added, “The housing sector’s potential as a driver of economic growth was evident in the job opportunities that the Renewed Hope Cities and Estates Programme had created, at an average of 25 jobs per house, the ongoing projects had directly and indirectly generated over 252,800 jobs for Nigerians, including skilled and unskilled workers.”