In what sounds as a boost to the anti-corruption fight in Nigeria, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) has said that it recovered N53 billion from a real estate developer for the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria.
Chairman of ICPC, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye who made the disclosure during a meeting with the House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee Investigating the Operations of Real Estate Developers in FCT, disclosed that in what looks like a scam, the developer took the money without providing houses for its subscribers. He emphasized that the Commission will always deploy its mandates against developers who took public funds with the promise to provide houses for public or civil servants without doing so.
The huge influx of people in the FCT has meant that there is a commensurate increase in demand for housing. But the demand has not been met adequately, either as a result of lack of housing units or because the ones available are not within the reach of civil and public servants, because there is actually a lot of housing estates, especially in the FCT Abuja.
Prof. Owasanoye also complained that the rising housing deficit in the country is being used by fraudulent real estate developers in the Federal Capital Territory to take advantage of desperate civil servants to scam them of their hard-earned money in the name of housing projects.
He assured the ad-hoc committee that the Commission was desirous of partnering with it to bring sanity to the housing sector because of its critical nature to the government. He told the committee that one of the ways to tackle housing deficit and fraudulent real estate developers in the country was for government to completely deploy technology as well as grant easy access to information.
In his words, “The lack of openness is also creating problems. Government should at least put information in the public domain where people can easily verify details of land. A lot of people are scammed from fake layout, double allocations and others.”
Earlier, the Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee, Hon. Blessing Onoh, observed that cases of developers defrauding would-be house owners were becoming rampant. Onoh maintained that it was common for real estate developers to start projects, later abandon them and move on to other cites after collecting monies from subscribers.
She said that the committee was set up to proffer solutions to the anomalies and ensure that Nigerians who subscribed to housing projects end up owning them in accordance with the terms of agreement they entered.
