Nigeria had no housing policy until May 2015 when President Mohammadu Buhari administration came into being and introduced a coordinated housing policy and housing schemes are being built in thirty-four states of the country.
Minster for Power, Works, and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, stated this in Calabar while addressing senior staff of the three ministries who are in the city a three-day retreat.
“I think I speak your minds if I say that there was no housing programme against three years ago and that today there is a national housing programme where we are building in thirty-four states. “I think I speak your minds if I say against three years ago, all the budget the work sector had for building of roads in the whole country was 18 billion and today we have close 300 billion naira and the work sector can say there is no state in Nigeria we are not building toad here or there.” He said three years ago the story was that transmission was the biggest problem and that there was not enough power to supply the power sector grid and there was not enough power to supply and averagely 2,690 megawatt was generated but that story has changed and generation has reached 7000 megawatts and 5,222 is being distributed, an all-time national high.
“Is there any one person who can say he did it on hisown. Of course, the applause we are receiving from the public belongs to the entire team and the captain of our team President Buhari and the vice President”.
He said emphasis should be on team work because he believes in the power of the team especially in public service.
“To reassess what we have done in the past years, I reflect to relevant ourselves and improve ourselves. From team work if you want to go fast go alone, nut if you want to far go as and team knowing that we have different capacities, strength and weaknesses and if we work together we will go very far.”
The minister said he retreat was to enable the public servants to do more for the generality of the people.
“Our responsibility is enormous.I don’t intend to scare you but that is the truth.”
He said mistakes could be made but there is need to understand that in the public sector life, it is because there are problems and mistakes.