An HBFC management that can properly handle its affairs with appropriate knowledge and experience should be sought.
KARACHI: The House Building Finance Corporation is more than 60 years old, as it was established in 1952. So it is an old organisation with some good and bad aspects, but essentially it has an unavoidable legacy. Because of its activities and business of very important social nature, it is the most important national institution. But of late, it has been operational without a board of directors and a regular managing director.
In 2009, the government appointed a so-called foreign experienced and so-called professional management who, because of a lack of background in dealing with the affairs of the organisation and antipathy towards the existing and well-experienced internal human resources, mismanaged the corporation for about four years and brought it to the verge of complete collapse.
The HBFC has the legacy of providing financial helps and house loans — of course, on the directives of the central or provincial governments — to displaced persons from occupied Jammu & Kashmir, displaced persons from former East Pakistan in 1971, land under the Sindh Gothabad Scheme, rehabilitation of victims from the great floods of 1974, former prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo’s scheme of shelter for homeless people, the Pakistan Housing Authority’s grand housing programmes, former President (Gen) Ziaul Haq’s and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s loan remissions for widows, orphans and retired government officials, etc.
The foreign returned, so-called ‘professional’ people never knew and never tried to know, the background of all such schemes and actions. So, out of sheer poor knowledge, these people badly handled the outstanding issues in the corporation, thus creating insurmountable problems for it and its workforce.
Then again, the HBFC is a public sector corporation, wholly owned by the federal government and its agencies, so it has to religiously follow various government rules, regulations and procedures, which require the supervision of government commercial auditors. These required years of knowledge and experience. But these people, with their arrogant approaches, created unnecessary antagonism with the government audit setup, without making any required arrangements for necessary improvements. The result was a disaster for the corporation — a near collapse situation. And without taking corrective measures, these people in the management, who had no loyalty towards the corporation and with the government’s valuable objectives, were always ready to move to greener pastures on the slightest opportunity. They were bent upon to establish the organisation as a totally gone case.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is very earnestly requested that in future an HBFC management that can properly handle its affairs with appropriate knowledge and experience should be sought. It must also be kept in mind that the HBFC is not the cup of tea for so-called foreign trained commercial bankers or pure private bankers. Otherwise, the HBFC would soon become defunct like SME Bank (formerly Small Business Finance Corporation – SBFC) and would be lying on death bad soon! We hope that the prime minister will save this corporation of utmost national and social importance through sagacious and sincere decisions.
Name withheld on request
Published in The Express Tribune, April 22nd, 2014.
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