My uncle, Professor Mustapha Zubairu, has a word for the minister of FCT. Enjoy.
El-Rufai was is known for bringing life to the dying embers of our green areas, for his buses, for bringing sanity to a capital city that was going crazy and for demolishing illegal structures. What is the new minister of FCT, Alhaji Mohammed Musa Bello, going to be known for?
Here are a few suggestions: build electronic toll gates, build up the slums, create tangible partnerships with neighboring states such as Niger and Nasarawa states.
The next paragraphs will give more details on the aforementioned items. It appears the minister has started well. I commend the Honourable Minister for the press conference he recently gave. What is really more urgent and fundamental is to make the development and management of the city holistic, inclusive and equitable. The Master Plan of the city prepared by IPA provided for and promoted the development of a city for the elites and the rich only; by non-consideration of affordability in land use policy and infrastructure development. IPA itself acknowledged this in its statement regarding the Master Plan produced in 1979 that “substantial proportion of the FCC residents would not be able to afford housing without substantial subsidy”.
It is equally obvious that IPA made deliberate choices of spatial development modules and development guidelines that they foresaw would have negative implications for the city and hence the country is today saddled with a big city that is not inclusive and affordable to the vast majority of the very same people the city depends on for its effective functioning. Curiously, IPA itself was disbanded and the partners seemed to have disappeared into the thin air immediately after submitting the Final Report of the Master Plan of the city to the Executive Secretary, Federal capital Territory (FCDA).
Perhaps time has also come to develop and manage the city in the context of a carefully structured and legalized Metropolitan Development and Management System covering Suleja-Abuja-Keffi. This should facilitate a more holistic, effective and sustainable management, financing and governance of the city, symbiotically with Niger and Nasarawa State governments.
I think that the Honourable Minister has three main tasks in the next fouryears.
First he has to find ways and means of consolidating the development that have been achieved in the city. This will, among others, involve upgrading and modernising of citywide infrastructure (water supply and road network in particular); putting all the large number of seemingly abandonedcompleted/uncompleted houses in the city into more constructive use; instituting a much more effective traffic management system, including the construction of many viable multilevel parking spaces in different parts of the city, in partnership with genuine private sector operators, to ease the chaotic traffic and generate vital IGR for the city; and ensuring that the city operates on a self-sustaining basis by establishing, among others, effective cadastral map (up-to-date data bank on housing units by streets and neigbourhoods) of the city. This will facilitate theadministration of the city; ensure effective revenue collection; and enhance resource mobilization for promoting infrastructural and other development in the city.
The enhanced capacity for internally generated revenue will increase the prospects of the cityto be able to raise loans (or bonds) for local infrastructural development from the capital market and Development Finance Institutions.
It’s obvious that the days of FGN acting and behaving like a “Father Christmas” to the residents of the city is long over. People must be prepared to pay their equitable share of the cost of service provision in the city.
Secondly the Honourable Minister shoulddevise ways and means of managing the army of commuters entering the city daily. The city depends on their services while they depend on the city for their sustenance. The answer may be in the provision of effective and sustainable mass transportation system- Light train, BRT and the introduction of electronic toll gates. The FCT administration should be able to recover a substantial cost of maintaining the roads and related infrastructure and to more effectively manage the traffic to and within the city.
Thirdly, the slums and squatter settlements around the city are inevitable, as seemingly inhuman and prone to environmental disaster, as most of them are. City administration since the inception of the Abuja, FCT, has been profoundly weak, characterized by a high turnover of highly trained staff; too much focus on the building of the city and its infrastructure; and scant regards to the welfare and living condition of the workers required for the construction and maintenance of the city. The solution, in addition to what the minister mentioned, is to make the slum upgrading process inclusive, stakeholder-driven and based on a more realistic standards. Functional and self-sustaining neigbourhoods and satellite towns can be the products of a carefully thought out slum upgrading. The possibility of, constructively, engaging the private sector in the programme should be explored. There are many global best practices to learn from, such as those of UN-HABITAT with which my center (in Minna) works.
To me the legacy of the Minister in particular and PMB’s administration is to create a more inclusive, equitable, just and self-sustaining city for all. A solid foundation for achieving this objective can be laid within the next four years.
Professor Mustapha Zubairu is a former MD of Federal Housing Authority and the Director, Centre for Human Settlements and Urban Development at the Federal University of Technology, Minna. He can be reached at [[email protected]]
