Fashola laments payment for homes in advance

The governor who spoke at the BlueRoof Hall, LTV Complex, Agidingbi added that this explains why the State Government intervened on rent control and management by passing a legislation that no home owner should take more than a year’s rent.A statement from the Special Adviser to the Governor on Media, Hakeem Bello, said Fashola maintained […]

The governor who spoke at the BlueRoof Hall, LTV Complex, Agidingbi added that this explains why the State Government intervened on rent control and management by passing a legislation that no home owner should take more than a year’s rent.
A statement from the Special Adviser to the Governor on Media, Hakeem Bello, said Fashola maintained that the practice itself is bad enough because asking people who get their salaries on monthly basis to come and pay three years rent in advance is simply about the people hurting themselves.
“If I’m getting my salary at the end of September and my landlord is saying that I must bring three years rent in advance, when I have not even received one month salary in advance. Nobody gets salary in advance that I know, but in this society we have pretended as if all is well”, he added.
He reiterated that if Nigerians continue to accept three years rent or four years rent, the person paying it must have simply compromised somewhere, which means corruption is being embedded.
Explaining that it was unpracticable for government to give out homes free of charge, the governor said what encourages him is that after 500 or 600 years in Britain, it is just about 64 percent of them that are home owners while the rest are tenants.
He reminded that even in those countries too, any prospective home owner would still need to put down at least 20-25 percent of the equity which is almost what is being done in Lagos.
He explained that he did some comparison so that people would understand that there is no country in the world that has been able to provide homes for all of her people as home owners and that there would always be a combination of people who own homes and people who rent homes.
The Governor who also described affordability as an economic concept, “I have challenged  some people to say look, affordability is not an isolated concept, it is an economic concept based on the price of sand, the cost of cement, the cost of iron rod, the cost of money and of course sustainability. If you build a house at N10 and you sell at five naira over time you will lose all your money and your capacity to build more is gone”.
“So we must build and we  must sell with subsidies that keeps the project going for others, the truth is that the houses you inherit today is the product of the taxes other people have paid”, he explained.
He added that such people who pay taxes expect that they would also get their fair share in the future, adding that Lagos has chosen to start from one place and have real home owners.
“We have real home owners, not some of the advertisements you see on television, about homes that you cannot see, about mortgage opportunities that there are no beneficiaries, about roads that exist only in photographs; this is a real life event. We can talk to the applicants, the homes you see in your photographs  actually exist, people have moved into them, only those who have done what we have done can actually begin to challenge us  and say that see, we can do it better than you”, he reiterated.