The advantage Abuja has over Lagos the erstwhile Federal Capital City of Nigeria is the availability of vast lands for various developments in contrast to its absence in Lagos, where expansion now is now more towards the ocean with the reclamations along the shoreline due to congestion and over crowdedness in the city.
Abuja Master plan budgeted 250km2 for the use as the Federal Capital City. The rest vast land of about 7,750km2 is left for regional development. It is expected that, with prudent land management, whatever the pressure is on land demand, land would still be adequate in Abuja for a very long time in the future, for sustainable development and the essential use as the Federal Capital of Nigeria which it has been created for.
In the Abuja Master Plan, what was budgeted for residential use out of the original 25,498 ha total city size, was 48.97%. While 32.55% was budgeted for open space and recreation. Meanwhile, the situation analysis presented in the Abubakar DansadauCommittee report of 2010 was that, between 2007 and April 2010, spanning barely 4 years, as many as 19,907 plots allocations were made.
Upon categorization of the allocations into land use types, it was disclosed that, a whopping 89.14% was for residential use, while Open Space/Green Areas was only 0.25%. If such a pattern is maintained for allocations in the whole city, there shall be very substantial and unimaginable deviation from the original IPA budget for the residential and open spaces/recreational uses.
The Dansadau Committee did not give the records of applications for development permit at the Development Control Department for the corresponding period covering the period these numbers of allocations were made. If it does, we would have discovered that, on the contrary, the number of applications for development shall be very insignificant in comparison with the number of allocations. The disappointment shall be more if we consider only those that eventually got building plans approval.
In reality the greater percentage of the beneficiaries of land allocations in Abuja never apply for building plans approval which will signify intention for the actual development. Even if they do, many are not being approved due to none compliance with the development guidelines. The others that eventually get approval would not commence the development as expected. Many that would commence the development would not be completed according to the time line, and could ultimately get abandoned due to lack fund.
As a planned City, with zoning regulations, the importance of having a land use plan to serve as instrument for development control, can never be overemphasized. Land allocations are strictly to be made in compliance with the provisions of the Land Use and the budget. But contrarily, it tilts towards satisfying the desires of the applicants.
According to Kent (1964), “A city plan is a master design for the physical development of the territory of the city. It constitutes a plan of the division of the land between public and private uses, specifying general location and extent of new public improvements.
“The plan should be designed for considerable period in the future, twenty-five to fifty years. It should be based, therefore, upon a comprehensive and detailed survey of things as they are at the time of the planning, such as the existing distribution of existing developments, both public and private, the trends toward redistribution and growth of population, industry and business, estimate of their future trends of growth and the allotment of the territory of the city in accordance with all such data and estimated trend, so as to provide the necessary area for private development corresponding to the needs of the community present and prospective”.
It is instructive to note that in a stakeholders’ forum in 2012, the former FCT Minister, BalaMohammed stated that, 90% of the allocated plots in the FCT are not developed, and he attributed that to lack of infrastructure. In the same occasion he further stated that aggregate provision of infrastructure in the FCT since existence is not more than 25%.
However, it is important to know that it is not the number of the allocations that determine the sizes of the land use. Because, open space and recreational lands are mostly bigger than residential or other uses. That is why one violated recreational land could be parceled and converted into tens of residential plots.Other casualties of violations from the original land use proposal are public facilities in the district and neighbourhood centers across the City.
On the other hand there are concentration of these allocations in and around the areas surrounding the initial phases of the City development. These are phase I and II. Even without infrastructure many of thesurrounding Districts could be under construction due to the pressure for acquisition of land for developmentby those who are capable.
The fact today is that the importance of complying with the provision of land use budget according to the original concept of the Abuja Master plan is now a thing of the past.
