Kaduna to mortgage 3,300 civil servants houses over rentage

The Kaduna State Government has said it would mortgage 3,300 housing units occupied by civil servants due to the poor revenue accruing to its coffers from the rent on the property.

The Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport, Hassan Mahmoud Usman and his counterpart in the Ministry of Economic Planning, Muhammed Sani Abdullahi said Governor Nasir El-Rufai was making efforts to improve the revenue generation in the state to prosecute projects and programmes for the benefits of the people.

They showcased government achievements in the past two years, just as they highlighted the challenges confronting the El-Rufai’s administration.

Usman, who lamented the poor revenue from the 3,300 housing units occupied by civil servants, said: “We inherited the housing units from the past administration and we got was only N1 million per annum as rent from the occupants and we need to continue to maintain the houses.”

He said if government continued with the present rent, which is a little above N600 monthly, it would not be able to meet its obligation to generate revenue for the maintenance of the apartments and serve the people.

People were living in the houses and were saying they are civil servants and were not paying the commensurate rent At least we have houses of N3 million rent per annum in Kaduna. So, we decided to sell the 3,300 houses out. If you are ling in those houses and you are interested then you can come and bid for one of them,” he added.

Besides, while highlighting the budget performance for the year, Abdullahi said the state had achieved over 30 percent implementation of the budget.

He explained that over 11 contractors have been dragged to the Economic financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for investigation and prosecution for allegedly siphoning the mobilisation funds for work not executed.

“For most of last year, the local contractors do not have resources to facilitate their work. But we mobilized most of the contractors. And we have contractors who did different things with the money we gave them.

“In fact, I had to pursue one of the contractors under this category in Kubau and we referred any contractor who took money to the EFCC. There was also a bridge in Saminaka for which we mobilised the contractor who said it was completed and we paid. Only for us to discovered later that the bridge was not there,” he stated.

Meanwhile, in a statement by the Senior Special Assistant to the Governor, Samuel Aruwan said that the Audited Accounts already published by the government showed that during the year under review, the combined revenue of grew from N65 billion in 2015 to N74 billion in 2016 representing an increase of 13 percent.