Civil Servants who have begun to enjoy the Federal Government Staff Housing Loan Board Scheme (FGSHLB) are at the risk of losing their homes should they default in payment as and when due.
The Executive Secretary of the Housing Loan Scheme Board, Dr Hannatu Fika made this statement while inspecting the estates built for this purpose in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
She noted that the Federal Government could stake a claim to those estates should the beneficiaries of the scheme fail to service the loan used to acquire the property.
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Fika also noted that the Federal Government signed an undertaking to develop the properties. Though the properties may belong to the civil servants, the Federal Government still has the right to reclaim it in case of a negotiation breakdown.
“Our connection with these estates is, they belong literarily to federal public servants, who identified a developer and introduced the developer to us and instructed us to pay their own loan to the developer so that we can provide houses for them.
“And these houses we are seeing are houses that came through that partnership between the developers and the civil servants.”
In a bid to quickly recover the housing loan, Fika is optimistic that the civil servants will comply with the directive, to avoid anything that may tamper with the quality of the estate.
A Nairametrics report mentioned the three steps to solve housing problems in Nigeria. Some of the steps border on the building of mass housing units in every state, scrapping the usual initial payment of 10% equity from approved off-takers for housing mortgage loans less than N5 million and a recapitalization of the Federal Mortgage Bank.
Forward-looking: The Federal Government might want to consider a more effective means of curtailing the shortfall associated with the loan repayment to avoid ejecting workers placed under its care.
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