Housing cooperative societies billed as most ideal to house the nation

Francis Kamande, chair of the National Cooperative Housing Union.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has been advised to use the cooperative model to realise his push to build 500,000 low and middle cost housing units by 2022.

“It has reached a point where he has to ask himself whether it is possible to deliver the units with two budgets (2020/21 and 2021/22) to implement before he retires. And the whole project by 2022 require Sh400 billion,” says Francis Kamande, chair, National Cooperative Housing Union.

Uhuru has, instead, been urged to establish a direct government seed capital of Sh40 billion to be credited to housing cooperatives to fast track the housing agenda.

Mr Kamande says the government should abandon the housing levy route and instead inject the housing cooperative movement with 10 per cent of the total budget. The cooperatives then match the seed capital ‘shilling for shilling’ and the total budget will rise to Sh800 billion.

Former Maragua MP Elias Mbau, an economist, says the housing cooperative route “will meet focused members organised in a group of like-minded aspiring to own homes”.

He says the current format of the housing agenda will be hard to sell especially to “low income earners disillusioned in their hand to mouth budgets as well as the middle income earners grappling with fragile job securities”.

Current model untenable

Urithi Housing Cooperative Society chairman Samuel Maina says the only way the State can realise the housing agenda, “and this not by 2022 as the president commits himself to, but rather for the sensible long-term time frame, is assist Kenyans to own houses of their preference, not of government’s preference.”

He says there is a disconnect in the way the agenda is being implemented, adding “there is no sense in taxing people to build houses with no guarantee that the taxed will benefit”.