BY TPL Umar Shuaibu
Lands in urban areas are under the custody of the constituted authorities in all the States on trust for the citizens. This is to ensure judicious uses and guide against violations of the approved plans. Contrarily, land is now being misused as a commodity for making money by the people in the authority who are entrusted for its management and protection.
Initially, building plots in the Federal Capital were allocated on equitable basis of federal character. It could be remembered that sometimes between 1982 and 1985, and even beyond, land allocations were posted via post office address of applicants, and later published on notable newspapers. But it later became something you did to help a friend who has no intention of building a house in the territory.
Such an allottee usually sells the plot to raise quick money from people or corporations who need to build houses in Abuja. This is one of the reasons for the high cost of land and the slow pace of housing development in the territory. As the level of greed in this regard grew, little attention came to be paid to the details of the Master plan.
As presented by the Late Professor Mabogunje in 1999, “The civilian administration that took over from the military regime in 1979 ended up with a very different agenda. True enough it wanted the capital to be moved from Lagos. But it was less concerned with any of the principles that had underlay the original conception. The tremendous financial outlay for developing the new capital city was seen in the context of dispensing patronage to party faithfuls, rather than in terms of the Grand National gesture of the previous administration. The result was a series of distortions to the concept, direction and implementation of the Master plan”.
As with all forbidden fruits, ones tasted it never stops. Because even the military regimes that succeeded the Second Republic were not any different from the civilians that commenced the distortions. The situation got worst under the penultimate military regime before the commencement of the Fourth Republic, which went further to even revoke allocations already granted in favour of friends and cronies of the regime. A situation developed in which single individuals, particularly functionaries of government, came to own multiple plots.
Furthermore, as presented, was the fact that, the initial implementation strategy for the Master plan envisaged that the low-income workers would be housed in the “Accelerated District”. The scheme was then referred to as the Accelerated District Construction Project (ADCP).
The Accelerated District was meant to prevent the emergence of shanty towns of construction workers in the periphery of the capital city as was in the case in Brasilia. It was also to serve as a model for testing out the detailed plan concepts and to prepare the city for a projected population of no more than 160,000 by 1986, the year when the capital was to be formally moved to Abuja according to the original concept of the Master plan.
However, seeing the mass of buildings going up in the Accelerated District, the civilian government took the mistaken decision to rush the movement to Abuja by shifting it forward to the year 1982/83. However, it could be observed that while the President had a Presidential Guest House by that period, the actual movement of the Seat of Government from Lagos to Abuja couldn’t take place until December 12 1991.
This decision led to a helter-skelter building activities within the city area. It denied the planners the opportunity to test out the various plan concepts. More seriously it made it impossible to use the Accelerated District development to house the workers. The result was the emergence of shanty-towns and squatter settlements occupied by workers and the growing service population in such places as Karu/Nyanya, Karmo and Gwagwa.
Another major distortion arose by the decision of the military regime’s preference of a presidential palace secluded away and closer to Aso Rock than in the middle of the central area of the city where it was located on the Master plan. As stated, it was due to security concerns, on excuse of vulnerability of the President in the incident of military coup attempt. It further brought the military barracks at close range to the villa. That was the beginning of violations across the ONEX, where the Master plan proposed to be a buffer zone.
The present Presidential Villa somehow usurped the site of a National Monument. Its beauty and grandeur is no longer part of the prominent and salient features of Abuja, which Nigerians can easily identify as symbolizing the height of their democratic aspirations.
The abovementioned were some of the pre 1999 distortions of the provisions of the Abuja Master plan. In the subsequent years, the distortion assumed an astronomical dimension. The violations of approved land uses, with special reference to areas reserved for greening have a much wider and dangerous implications than imagined by the uninformed. They are not only limited to the loss of the city beautification, but are recipe to wide range of environmental disasters.
Concluded.
