NHC: Nehemiah Mchechu Discusses Housing and Real Estate in Tanzania

Nehemiah Kyando Mchechu, Director General of Tanzania‘s National Housing Corporation, explains what has been achieved by NHC so far, and talks about NHC´s current overall development strategy.

“I think it is good to give back some credit to the government. At least in the past decade, there has been a reasonable focus on the housing sector. In this country, the first time we saw a serious focus on the housing sector was in the early years of independence and especially between 1962 and 1974. Thereafter the housing sector was left as a household problem but this is beyond a household problem because every time you accumulate a deficit it is a national crisis. In 2010, the government had worked quite well to change some of the laws and legislations, bringing in the condominium law, the mobile financing amendment, etc. The next thing they did was to undertake a total overhaul and restructuring of the National Housing Corporation. I think it was important to do so because firstly it is the largest corporation in this country, it is also one of the top largest real estate sector companies in eastern central Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa we must be in the top 5. We are a company with a capital base of more than 1.6 billion dollars. We are not very small in a normal context, especially when you talk about developing countries or the third world. They saw the opportunity and saw that the corporation needed a restructuring and somebody or a group of people to come in and undertake the full reform. That is the reason I came in in 2010. I joined this company with a new board; all of us were appointed on the same day. During that time we have accomplished quite a lot of the targets that we set for ourselves. I think we have been able to achieve around 90% or so. The first thing that we did was to undertake the new strategic plan. We then went on to see if we had the right organisational structure to address the latest strategic plan. Then we looked to see if we had the right people to run those areas and then we had to bring in new people who had good track records and who understood the vision that the country needed to see this corporation taking. From there we started on the execution. We had given ourselves 6 goals. One was to become the leading real estate developer in Africa, secondly we wanted to become the leading real estate management firm because we realised that we had so many houses and so we had to improve our management practices. Our third goal was to work on making our operations efficient. Our fourth goal was regarding the laws in terms of development and reviewing all of the contracts that we had in order to see whether they were still meaningful. The fifth goal was reviewing our human capital base, to see whether we had the right people and if they were in the right positions. The sixth goal which is still very important was regarding our image, our branding. To cut a long story short, we have achieved 95% of our goals”, says Nehemiah Mchechu.