Federal Government says it will start charging owners of completed unoccupied houses triple ground rents instead of the single rate normally charged from three months after completion.
Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Ahmed Dangiwa, said this in an interview with journalists during his continuation to site visits of housing projects constructed by the government and its agencies on Friday in Abuja.

The projects inspected are the Suleja (Dikko) Prototype, Public-Private Partnerships Cooperative, Gwagwalada National Housing Programme and Guzape Federal Housing Authority (FHA) under the PPP arrangement.

Dangiwa affirmed that the issue of completed unoccupied properties was prevalent in the FCT and some states of the federation while many citizens were in dire need of accommodation.

“What is important now is that we want to take stock of all those houses, then we will interface with the owners and find out what they want.

“If they want to keep the houses unoccupied, the government will start charging them triple ground rent instead of a single ground rent that we charge.

“That will force them to either put it on rent at whatever amount or they sell them off. Because we cannot keep saying we have a housing deficit when we have a lot of empty houses that are completed and left unoccupied.

“We have charged the department of lands, urban and regional planning in our ministry to take stock of those estates to give the names of the proprietors or the owners of those estates.

“Any estate that stays more than three months unoccupied then we will start charging them triple ground rent. This is what we intend to do,” he said.

On the supervision of projects across the country, the minister said all state controllers would be empowered and given the proper tools and equipment to carry out their functions effectively.

“The second thing is the issue of supervision, we have state controllers in every state of the federation. We want to empower them by giving them the tools they need to supervise any project within their vicinity.

“Many of the state controllers we met with complained that they do not have even the vehicles to move around with some of the tools for supervision and other things.

“So, we have taken note and we are going to ensure that we provide them with all the tools they need and empower them so that they supervise our projects nationwide effectively.

“On the issue of land, we make it so that instead of going to states looking for land the federal ministry may have lands in those locations we just use those lands.

“That is why we are tasking all our state controllers of housing to ensure that they give us the catalogue of all the land that they have, their status and what they are used for,” Dangiwa said.

NAN