In its effort to shore up transparency and accountability in its work, the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) has launched what it calls NHF Mobile & Internet Platform.
According to management of the premier housing bank in Nigeria, this platform enables contributors to the National Housing Fund (NHF) “have real time access to their NHF contributions and receive credit alerts as soon as their contributions are remitted to the bank”.
Employers are therefore, expected to forward the current contact details of contributors to the bank.
All NHF contributors, both employed and self-employed are asked to prevail on their employers, or personally provide their current contact details through any of the FMBN state offices nearest to them nationwide.
According to the bank, this information which should be addressed to the FMBN State Coordinators include: name, organisation, NHF Number, telephone number and email address of those enrolled in the scheme.
The bank is however worried that response to this has been poor as many employers have yet to comply.
The bulk of the NHF contributors is from the states across Nigeria. Recently, FMBN published names of states that have failed to key into the housing scheme.
The bank currently has a capital base of no more than N5 billion, of which only N2.5 billion is paid.
Featuring as artiste recently on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA)’s week day programme, Good Morning Nigeria, the Managing Director of FMBN, Mr. Ahmed Dangiwa lamented that some employers collect the NHF contributions but fail to remit them to FMBN or they do not collect them at all.
Upon his appointment as Managing Director in April last year, Dangiwa made sanitising the bank his ultimate aim.
He has therefore, audited accounts and constituted “a taskforce to resolve all niggling issues and ensure timely delivery”.
In its 25 years of being, only 77,000 mortgages have been accessed and out of a workforce of 60 million, only 4.4 million contribute in the scheme.
The scheme established by Act 3 of 1992 was to enable Nigerians, particularly those within the low and medium income levels who cannot afford commercial housing loans, such as civil servants, traders, artisans and commercial drivers access mortgages.
