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Decent housing is the right of all Tanzanians

Editor
Daily News; Saturday,November 01, 2008 @22:45

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Land, Housing and Human Settlement Minister John Chiligati on Tuesday moved two bills in the National Assembly in Dodoma that are aimed at paving way for the majority of Tanzanians to secure soft housing loans. They are the Mortgage Financing (Special Provisions) Act, 2008; and the Unit Titles Act, 2008.

To the uninitiated, mortgage is, by one definition, the pledging of a property to a lender as a security for a mortgage loan. While a mortgage in itself is not a debt, it is evidence of a debt. It is a transfer of an interest in land, from the owner to the mortgage lender, on the condition that this interest will be returned to the owner of the real estate when the terms of the mortgage have been satisfied or performed.

In other words, the mortgage is a security for the loan that the lender makes to the borrower. Shelter is one of mankind’s basic needs after food and clothing and is thus a serious issue. With the ever-rising cost of living, including soaring construction costs, high food prices and galloping fuel prices, the need for one to access housing loan is now more urgent than ever before.

Tanzanians remember with much nostalgia the days of the Tanzania Housing Bank (THB) which provided housing finance in terms of loans to prospective home buyers or people who wanted to build their own houses. It worked out fine in the beginning before unceremoniously collapsing in 1993.

Its demise was prompted by the liberalisation of the banking sector at a time when it had already issued many housing loans which were irrecoverable due to high default rate. Since then there have been efforts to establish a new housing finance facility that will provide loans to house buyers/developers to no avail to date.

People have had no alternative but to use their meagre finances build houses, preferring to acquire plots at own pace. It is largely uncommon in Tanzania for people to purchase completed units. The need for the establishment of finance facility in Tanzania is crucial. Efforts have been made by the government to establish such a facility as a way of solving housing shortage in the country. At least, there is now hope in the horizon after this new development. Hopefully, Tanzanians will now get the housing finance facility they have been longing for.

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