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REDAN advocates remittance from pension fund for mortgages

By Nkechi Onyedika-Ugoeze, Abuja
08 July 2015   |   11:36 pm
The Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN) has urged the federal government to provide a linkage between the National Housing Fund (NHF) and the Contributory Pension Fund Scheme to enable workers to access the funds for housing mortgages. The association stressed that such linkage is the way the funds would have meaningful impact on…

The Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN) has urged the federal government to provide a linkage between the National Housing Fund (NHF) and the Contributory Pension Fund Scheme to enable workers to access the funds for housing mortgages.

The association stressed that such linkage is the way the funds would have meaningful impact on the welfare of the workers in the long term instead of making workers access such at retirement when inflation may have affected the value of the contribution.

The body also appealed to government to take a critical look in restructuring and reforming the housing sector and then inject the needed funds, stressing that the present capital base of N5billion for the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) is grossly inadequate to create the needed mortgage for Nigerians.

President of REDAN, Ugochukwu Chime who made the call at a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja noted that both NHF and the pension fund were first created to ensure that an average Nigerian worker is catered for while in service and on retirement.

He said: “There are three elements that form the basic needs of man and they are food, shelter and clothing. Now government had intervened in the issue of food as we have single digit fund available for farming and single digit funds available to some other sectors but unfortunately the same government has not deemed it necessary to implement some of the provisions of the national housing fund”.

He argued that in the national housing fund, there are supposed to be four sources of contribution to that fund, but regretted that the only source of contribution to the fund presently has been workers, stressing that the banks, the federal government and the insurance companies are supposed to contribute to the fund.

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