FMBN will introduce new building methods to reduce cost of houses, says MD

The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) said on Monday it was working hard to introduce new building methods that would substantially reduce the cost of houses in the country.

The Managing Director of the bank, Mr Gimba Yau'Kumo, told newsmen in Abuja that the reason most civil servants could not access the fund was due to their low salary level.

``If you look at the earning of Nigerians, particularly for somebody who earns N18, 000, N18, 000 today is not up to a N100 going by today’s exchange rate.

``That person is not in the position to own even one bedroom apartment from the present structure.

``So we are working together with the ministry to see if we can have discount on some of the inputs that make up a house.

``Like discount on cement, discount on rods for construction; and also what we are trying to do on our own is to introduce new building methods that will now reduce the cost of houses substantially.`` He said.

The managing director sad that civil servants were not being robbed of the National Housing Funds (NHF) as believed in some quarters.

He said that the NHF was a scheme that entitled all Nigerians above the age of 21 in paid employment to have access to loan at low interest rate to own a house.

According to him, members contribute 2.5 per cent of their monthly salary to the fund through the bank at an interest rate of four per cent on the loan collected.

Yau’kumo said that the bank had issues with facilitating access to funds that would enable Nigerians to own houses at affordable rates.

He identified the cost of building materials as a cause for concern to the bank, saying: ``we just came back from Thailand with some building stakeholders to study how they were able to build affordable houses especially after the tsunami.

``We discovered that they made seven universities to do research on affordable and sustainable housing and they came up with cheaper ways of building houses.

``We discovered that they built their houses with less cement and much sand; so we took some sand from here to three universities there for research.

``And it was discovered that our sand was 17 times better than their own sand; so they are producing some blocks for us, which have less than five per cent cement content.

``So with all these, the issue with affordability will be addressed because apart from that, we want to also address the issue of delivering quality houses.``

Yau’kumo appealed to state governments to grant the bank and labour organisations free access to land to enable them to build more houses for civil servants.

He said that free access to lands would enable the bank to build cheaper houses.

He said that with the combination of free land, less cement and other cheap building materials, the cost of houses would be substantially reduced.