Difficulties of Vietnamese Construction Minister Nguyen Thanh Nghi

Minister of Construction Nguyen Thanh Nghi

Perhaps, the whole term of Minister of Construction from 2021 to 2026 of Nguyen Thanh Nghi is to devote all his energy on social housing. Building a million houses will not be too much, if it is a clean government with a large source of capital for society. However, this regime does not focus on housing for the people nor health care, and does not focus on education but on building the army and the police forces. Because these are swords and shields that protect the regime.

The plan proposed by Nguyen Thanh Nghi is considered by some analysts to be too much for anyone to be a minister, not just Nguyen Thanh Nghi. His predecessors were not well-trained like him. Therefore, he is considered a technocrat like former Deputy Prime Ministers Vu Duc Dam and Pham Binh Minh. And the dismissal of the two technocrats above is a warning for Nguyen Thanh Nghi. It is unclear whether he realizes it or not.

Building one million social houses for less than VND1 billion each is considered a myth. Currently, although the housing market has frozen but there is no house worth VND2 billion each.

At the beginning of this project, Nguyen Thanh Nghi worked with Mr. Pham Nhat Vuong’s Vinhomes and with Mr. Bui Thanh Nhon’s Novaland, along with many other real estate giants, and won these businesses’ support. They are also actively promoting the project.

In fact, Vinhomes and Novaland promote to receive preferential loans and easy approvals for these giants. The project of 1 million houses has been launched for more than one year, by this stage, both Vinhomes and Novaland are running out of capital. They are afraid to raise capital on the stock market, because this market is a trap that causes Trinh Van Quyet, Do Anh Dung and Truong My Lan to be imprisoned. They need to raise capital, so they accept to build social housing to earn capital. However, the financial crisis came faster, and the funding for the project came too late. It seems that these giants are also starting to ignore the social housing project.

Building social housing requires 95% private capital

On March 10, a domestic newspaper said private capital accounted for 95% of financia resources for building social housing. Minister Nguyen Thanh Nghi worked with previous real estate giants to socialize his ambitious project. However, most real estate businesses are now also fed up with his policy. These businesses, they can’t even save themselves, how can they save his project?

Talking about social housing, Nguyen Duc Lenh, Deputy Director of the Bank for Social Policy in Ho Chi Minh City said that the program for workers to borrow money to buy and repair houses in the city has been implemented since 2018 until now, only 310 customers have been able to borrow with a total amount of nearly VND150 billion. Thus, compared with the demand is still too modest. In addition, workers also have difficulties when they need reciprocal capital to borrow.

Thus, the project of one million houses of Minister Nghi is currently frozen at both ends. The input is that the project enterprises are not very interested, the output side, even if there is a house under VND1 billion each, the workers do not have money to buy it, because the poor cannot borrow billions of dong to buy home. Who lends money to the poor? If the debt turns into bad debt, who can bear it?

It can be said that no one knows how to continue Nghi’s ambitious project. Although his project was supported by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, it is not very feasible. It is very difficult to make such a policy when prices of Vietnam’s real estate are so far away from the average income of the people.

Thoibao.de (Translated)

Kasse animation 7.8.2023