By Williams Anuku Abuja
Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Works and Housing has written off statistics that Nigeria’s housing deficit is on the high side.
According to him, more often than not rural-urban migration was at the core of mass housing deficits, insisting that nowhere in the world has housing been adequate for the entire population.
Fashola who made this assertion on Thursday, at the briefings organised by the Presidential Media Team, also said state governments have been asked to intervene especially in the management of renting.
His reaction came on the heels that Nigeria currently has about a 17million housing deficits, a claim that the World Bank and the African Development Bank have debunked.
Fashola said most people you see migrating to the urban centres have vacant houses at the rural level which they abandoned, hence such a scenario cannot provide enough justification for housing deficits.
On infrastructural development, he said the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has taken bold steps to attack projects that seemed impossible for previous governments, siting the second Niger Bridge, Lagos Oworinshoki road, third mainland bridge repairs, Kano-Abuja road among others.
He lamented that despite these achievements in infrastructures, budget deficits pose some challenges.
According to the Minister, most times when budgets are prepared the full money doesn’t get released to the ministry to meet its contractual obligations.
Buttressing his position, he said in 2014 he inherited a budget of N18billion but as of today, it has risen to over N200billion.