Lagos State Commissioner for Housing Moruf Akinderu-Fatai has assured Lagosians that more housing schemes will be commissioned soon.
The Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration, he said, is passionate on bridging housing deficits.
According to him, the LagosHoms Sangotedo Scheme II, is coming on board soon with 444 units.
“I can also assure you that by December 2022, it will be ready. Mr Governor commissioned 744 units last year. With the upcoming 444 units, we’ll have 1,188 home units for Sangotedo,” he said.
He said parts of the challenges hindering massive housing projects like the ones Lagosians witnessed during Alhaji Lateef Jakande’s era are inavailability of lands and funds. These coupled with the peculiarity of abandoned projects affected our outcomes.
“If you give us a bare land to operate, I can tell you that within 18 months, we will finish a housing project; but when you talk about a project abandoned for years, and you have different contractors with diverse challenges, some would have spent the money without anything to show for it. You will have to start negotiating. Again, this delays completion of projects.
“So what we do as a government to get out of a situation of abandoned project is that we pressurize the contractors to work. Some contractors might not be interested again after being out of site for years; some might be dead, while some firms could have folded up. That is the challenge with Ndubuisi Kanu Housing scheme in Gbagada but we have been able to reach an appreciable stage in spite of all the challenges . So far, it has been so difficult to convince most of them to speed up work because sometimes we will have to threaten them with prosecution before they could deliver.
“We knew what we went through before getting the Sangotedo Scheme 1 completed,” he said, adding “I want to thank Mr Governor who had to personally step in before we could get some recalcitrant contractors to complete their tasks .”
Akinderu-Fatai admitted that the State Government was not happy to always be on the neck of their private partners to deliver but things need to move fast so as to make greater impact in terms of housing delivery .
He concluded that plans are being firmed up for delivery of mass housing scheme in Imota.
“Soon Imota will host a scheme of over 3,000 homes to be built through public private partnership mainly for workers” he said.