‘NLC allowed itself to be used by Kriston Lally’

You recently ended your tenure. What impact did you make on this association?First, I thank my colleagues for giving me the platform to showcase my potential. I took over the mantle of leadership precisely on 18 February, 2009. I had that honour again in 2012 to be elected by my members. We’ve created a lot […]

You recently ended your tenure. What impact did you make on this association?
First, I thank my colleagues for giving me the platform to showcase my potential. I took over the mantle of leadership precisely on 18 February, 2009. I had that honour again in 2012 to be elected by my members.
We’ve created a lot of awareness. We’ve moved the association from a young baby to an institution that’s coming to change our world in terms of affordable housing delivery.
We’ve moved from where we were squatting to a befitting office in the Federal Mortgage Bank area office. We’ve been able to put in place office structure. We now have an executive secretary and units that relate to people from membership to the accounts.
We’ve established lots of institutional relationship with the whole lot of major institutions of stakeholders within and outside the country.
In Nigeria for instance, we’ve been able to strengthen our relationship with the Federal Mortgage Bank. We’ve never had it so good until of recent. With the support of the management committee of the Federal Mortgage Bank, we’ve been able to establish a very good relationship with our parent ministry, the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development.
We’ve been able to cultivate good relationship with lots of professional bodies in the built industry. In fact, we’ve established an enduring relationship with financial institutions outside the shores of Africa like the World Bank, IMF and the intercontinental mortgage financial instructions like Shelter Afrique.   
We’ve exposed our members to a lot of capacity building programmes. They’ve travelled within and outside the country. We’ve brought specialists to come develop them. They’ve gone to South Africa, America, Europe for seminars.
We’ve established good relationship with Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to tackle money laundering. We’ve established relationship with NIPS, Nigeria Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies where our members go acquire management skills.
We’ve established good relationship with the Nigerian Institute of Building and Road Research Institute, NIBRI in an attempt to crash construction costs without compromising standards and quality. It’s helping us to do a lot of research and expose us to local contents in order to make do with what we have within the country.
Among members, we’ve been able to upscale strength. Some of them have moved from being just a developer to a company whereby they can render services on a large scale to close up the deficit.

Have you a way of checking developers so the place isn’t despoiled?
That’s what our parent ministry has been able to do. For several years, we didn’t have a national housing policy. Now we have a policy adopted and approved by the Federal Executive Council. Housing delivery is being taken seriously.
REDAN as an institution is now to be professionalized under the National Housing Policy, section 2662. REDAN will become an act of parliament to be supervised by the Minister of Lands, Housing and Urban Development. By the time this is done, REDAN will have the powers to regulate beyond the level we operate now because membership now is voluntary, even though some government organizations like the Federal Mortgage Bank and FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and our parent ministry, the Federal Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development are always very critical of developers not being members. In fact, in FMBN, it’s an administrative policy that before you have any business to do with them, you must be a member of REDAN. To a reasonable extent, that allows us to have considerable control over members that deal with those institutions.

How many REDAN members have we in Nigeria?
When it was established in 2003, we had over 1,600. But in the last six years when I came on board, they haven’t been many. The active ones are less than 300 in the past six years.

Have you idea of the number of estates, for instance in Abuja?
I can give you information based on the ones my members developed. Because every year, members come in to recertify or give more information about themselves and from my database, I can avail you with…but if you look at Abuja as a whole, a lot of people, over night, all you need to do is get land and prospective customers and you become a developer.
And that’s why we end up in some of these crises like the NLC and Kriston Lally thing. You ask yourself, what’s the antecedents of the company? They might be doing things but they don’t have the capacity to handle what they got through NLC. We’re shocked that an institution like NLC would allow itself to get carried away and excited to the extent that…just pick on any developer based on the package submitted to go into business.

We traced Kriston Lally’s office. It was in a boys’ quarters on 46 Lobito Crescent, Wuse Abuja. This is a company that was given contract to build 600 houses in one year.
When I started classification programme of REDAN people looked at it as opportunity to push some people down. But this was opportunity to grow developers. You can start from small.
What did we say about classification? Your financials and your information on what you’ve done…if you’re the type that builds between one and 50 houses, you fall within the lowest category. Fifty to 100 another category; above 100 another category; and the highest category. This was attempt to place people where they belonged. I still maintain that developers must be classified.

You talked about the building policy. We hope it won’t go the way of the build code.
The problem is we have a National Building Code that was just voluntary. Aside that, for building code, there’re no sanctions for violators. It’s like ordinary paper and as much as we try to do something on the National Building Code, each time we come together, either as professionals in the built industry or on the floor of the National Assembly, there’s no coming together. Everyone wants to assert himself/herself higher than others and shift blames. Architects will say should there be any problem, I’ve done my design.

The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria: People lament that going through the bank to own a house is difficult but the bank says it’s doing much.
When you look at the FMBN Act and the NHF Act, honestly, the present board and management FMBN are doing their best. They can’t do better than what they’re doing. The Act is so difficult that it has constrained them. It makes it difficult for them to expand the frontiers of their funding outside the monthly contribution which is insignificant. What comes in a whole year can’t meet the requests from contributors in a month. And the law makes it difficult for them to go to the capital market and do all those things.
The NHF Act equally makes it difficult for FMBN to advance money to individuals to go build their houses because you must get a house and the house must have title; you have to come through another institution – that’s the primary mortgage institution [PMI]. Those will come with their challenges. No matter how good a beneficiary and the FMBN are, the people to package it, their problem will restrict you.
So when you aggregate the problems of the NHF/FMBN Acts, you add to the PMIs’ problems including their regulators, even if you scale one [hurdle], another is there. It may take six years for the transaction circle to be completed. To address housing delivery mechanism of government, we must revisit some of these Acts.
The funding of FMBN: Today, the capital base remains N5 billion even when we know that cost of houses is close to 1000 percent increase from when the Act was put together to now that services are required.
Take it from this way: you contribute N500 a month. If 1,000 of you contribute N500 every month, that’s N500,000. It’ll take 10 months to contribute N5 million that you need to buy a small house. This means in the next 10 months, all things being equal, 1,000 contributors contributing N500 a month, it’s after 10 months that FMBN will have funds to buy one house for one of the 1,000 contributors.