The Minister of State for Works and Housing, Mu’azu Jaji Sambo, has highlighted the need to review and reform the land use law to facilitate housing development in Nigeria.

The Minister made the remarks yesterday in Abuja during his visit to the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

He said the law is a big challenge for housing provision because under it all land is administered by state governments. He noted that the federal agency wanted to develop homes for low- and middle-income people, but did not have land.

“That means we’re at the mercy of different state governments for us to get land, because you can’t build a house on water, houses are built on land. And that land has to have titles. We also know that there are other things that are associated with these titles from the beginning to the end of these processes.

“That’s why I was saying there is a need for us to review the land use law and simplify it. The law does not help housing construction.

“We can have reforms, there are various reforms we have tried in other jurisdictions and it has worked successfully. Easy access to land will lead to easy access and provision of houses,” Sambo said.

He noted that the FHA was created to deal with a particular segment of society, adding that President Buhari’s nine-point priority areas included social inclusion.

According to him, social inclusion means the empowerment of the poor. He said that anyone who does not know where to sleep has an incomplete life. He said the president had made it clear that infrastructure was his number one priority.

He said infrastructure includes housing infrastructure and that there is no better organization to drive housing infrastructure than the Federal Housing Authority, whose history dates back to 1973.

In his welcome address, FHA Director General Senator Gbenga Ashafa said that when the current leadership took over in 2020, the authority was in limbo with its ability to fulfill its mandate at rock bottom, but now the narrative has changed. for the best.

Ashafa said management had, within a year of taking office, put in place a staff welfare program that provides a good working environment to ensure productivity. She has developed new partnerships with key industry players for an alternate source of authority project funding and is currently implementing the new corporate structure that will make FHA competitive in the new world economic environment. .

He said, “There are key challenges that appear to be a serious impediment to achieving the ultimate goal of bringing the FHA to a position of peak performance.

“The authority establishment laws are outdated and do not correspond to the current realities of industry expectations, the need for their revision is eminently important.”