Danjuma, was assigned the responsibility of midwifing Abuja to a successful birth. Under T Y
Danjuma’s watch, the key decisions taken included the appointment of consultants for the preparation
of the Abuja Master Plan, the ecological surveys, demographic audits and river blindness eradication
schemes. The resettlement of original inhabitants and the policy modifications all had the thoughtful,
decisive and balanced imprints of T Y Danjuma, a public leader highly respected in our nation.
Obasanjo, therefore, considered Abuja almost like his own child. He had appointed two ministers –
an architect and civil engineer in succession, between 1999 and 2003 to restore Abuja back on its
originally planned path and roadmap of order and orderliness, but nothing much happened under their
watch. Obasanjo was somehow confident that I could take on the assignment. That was the reason he
selected me – a person that he ended up supporting like his own son - for the FCT assignment, and he
added, that up to that point in time, I had not disappointed him.
As earlier mentioned, the planning and development of Abuja were guided by the Master Plan that
was prepared by International Planning Associates, an American firm. The Master Plan was to
enable the emergence of a new City that would function better than Lagos. Though Abuja was
conceived as a “Garden City”, it was also meant to be a functional and efficient one in terms of
movement of people and vehicles within its boundaries. Obasanjo’s anger was that the vision of
Abuja’s founding fathers was being lost due to the distortion of the Abuja Master Plan over the years.
This was essentially the situation until July 2003 when our administration assumed office.
Challenges Abuja Faced in 2003
At inception, the challenges before us were rooted in every facet of the development of the FCT - as
referred to severally in this book, not just in Abuja City itself but the surrounding ‘Satellite Towns’.
As the territory’s population had far exceeded the planned capacity of available infrastructure and
other facilities, the city had become filthy and unruly, surrounded by unplanned squatter settlements,
with over-stretched infrastructure. While the planned population of the city by the end of Phase 4 was
projected at three million inhabitants, we were informed in our ministerial briefings that the territory
contained over six million people, with only parts of Phases 1 and 2 completed in mid-2003.
There were many other infrastructural and social challenges. For instance, there was congestion in
FCT schools; some had 120 students in classrooms designed for 30. The FCT had 14 hospitals with
about five under construction, at various stages of completion. The roads were congested. The water
supply plan envisaged the building of ten storage tanks around the city as well as the orderly
expansion of the water treatment capacity, which by 2003 could only serve 650,000 people.
Many buildings, structures and shanties in the city were built on water pipelines, sewer trunk lines,
under high-tension electric lines and on green areas. Violations of land use regulations were rampant,
with plots designated for schools or religious institutions developed as residential or commercial
facilities and so on. Most of these were overlooked in the past due to the immense cost of removal
and the compensation payable by the government as many of the structures had approved Building
Plans and Certificates of Occupancy.
The restoration of the Abuja master plan meant demolishing some of these buildings, recovering parks
and green areas, clearing squatter settlements and expanding infrastructure and social services to meet
the needs of the rapidly expanding population of Abuja and its environs. I will describe briefly how
we planned and executed this controversial programme, which, as Machiavelli rightly observed of
citizens’ resistance to beneficial change, only attracted due recognition and accolades years after we
left office.
Preliminary Review and Early Signals
The two volume handing-over notes I received from the then Abuja Permanent Secretary, Dr.
Babangida Aliyu, [76] had little to say about illegal structures and other master plan violations. I
realized that unless I asked questions and dug deeper, no one was willing to talk about these thorny
issues. Consequently, on the 5th of August 2003, I asked Mallam Sani Kalgo, the Director of Land
Administration & Resettlement, to brief me on an international conference he had co-hosted on behalf
of the MFCT on the review of the Abuja Master Plan in 2001. After the briefing, during which Mr
Kalgo handed me a copy of the publication of the conference proceedings, I directed the permanent
secretary to furnish me with the several studies and reports related to the design, implementation and
distortions of the Abuja Master Plan. By the time my aides and I reviewed, digested and summarized
these reports, we realized that non-compliance with the Master Plan was inhibiting Abuja’s potential
to provide basic services to residents. The city’s green corridor had been abused, for instance, by
locating army barracks in areas for a national monument and landscaping for tourism and the addition
of unplanned districts like Guzape, Kpaduma and Kurunduma. Obstruction of flood plains by
buildings would lead to major flooding in areas like Kubwa. The misappropriation of green areas and
construction of corner shops had deprived Abuja of proper parks and shopping malls respectively.
The squatter communities that have emerged to overwhelm the satellite towns of the FCT have
become unsanitary urban sprawls that must be removed and relocated sooner or later. Garki Village,
a slum within the Federal Capital City, had become unmanageable, reminding everyone of Obalende
near South-West Ikoyi, Lagos. All these issues needed to be addressed in addition to the expected
attention and interest in the demolition of some visible buildings.
The good news was the realization that all the information needed to begin the restoration programme
had always been available in the ministry. A meeting with the Director of Development Control, Olu
Ogunmola, produced a list of over 300 illegal structures already identified for revocation of title,
notification and immediate removal. He was eager to start, but I decided otherwise. First, I briefed
President Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar of what we had found, and what the next
steps were going to be. I then obtained the consent of the president to begin the restoration exercise on
30th August 2003, with the removal of some buildings on a trunk sewer line along Accra Street. We
picked this location for its double demonstration effect – the street smelt from the odour of raw
sewage, so there was little dispute of the impact of the distortions, and the recovered area was to be
converted into a park for the enjoyment of the neighbourhood. I requested President Obasanjo’s
presence to bless the kick-off of the restoration. He confirmed immediately, cancelling a planned
weekend in Ota to be there.[77] We then approved the removal of buildings and fencing put up by
some high profile Nigerians[78] to send the signal that no one was above the law in FCT.
Task Force on Master Plan Enforcement
With our signalling phase over, we ordered a suspension of the exercise for a week. Then we
constituted a task force to oversee and execute the programme to ensure that from th
en on, every case
went through rigorous inter-departmental review and recommendation before I approved removal.
This ‘task force’ approach also served another purpose common in public service – sharing of blame
and responsibility for what we knew would be an unpopular, controversial course of action. All the
key MFCT directors were members of the Task Force, [79] and we gave them the mandate to co-opt
any officer needed to execute the assignment. The task force met initially weekly, which became daily
when I gave the deadline of December 31, 2003 for the completion of all restoration operations
within the Federal Capital City. The Task Force sent me weekly reports and daily memoranda to
approve the removal of structures that violated the development control regulations. We could not
remove every building that violated the master plan as they were many and would have been too
heavy a burden on our resources. We therefore had to prioritise and decide which buildings
constituted the most serious threats to the inhabitants of Abuja – these were those sitting on sewer
lines, water trunk lines, under high tension electricity lines and transportation (road, transit way,
flood plains, etc.) reservations. Some parks and green areas were recovered, but many were lost
permanently because of the quantum of compensation that would have been payable if we chose to
revert strictly and completely to the original Master Plan.
The Results of Enforcement Efforts
In the end, we removed some 945 buildings within the Federal Capital City, about 300 in Kubwa and
about 12,000 shanty structures and buildings in some of the squatter settlements in Idu-Karmo, parts
of Jiwa, Gwarimpa, Jabi and Anguwan Mada. In addition, about 11,000 illegal structures and
containers were removed to restore Wuse Market to its original design. Additional new shops were
also built in the market. We relocated 30,215 traders occupying the site of the Abuja Central
Shopping Mall in Central Area to Dei-Dei, thus clearing the fire-prone Bakassi Market.
We recovered 33 green areas, developed and commissioned twelve recreational parks all over the
City and the satellite towns. We developed an irrigated tree nursery with over 30 indigenous varieties
of plants at Wuse II, the first of its kind in Nigeria. We procured, propagated and nurtured to maturity
about one million seedlings to trees that were planted in the city. When the parks became very
popular, we introduced park rules and regulations alongside a policy document that guided the
development and management of parks in the FCT. We had great ambitions for Jabi Lake, but sadly,
we were unable to get both banks of the lake developed with the recreational and tourist facilities we
had dreamt of. [80]
We cleared all illegal buildings on transit ways, [81] removed three wrongly located petroleum
stations[82] that compounded the traffic congestion at AYA junction, and built an overhead bridge
and roundabout to ease traffic in the area. We recovered and secured the Gudu and Gwarimpa
cemeteries, and clearly demarcated them between Christian, Muslim and Unclaimed corpses with
Abuja Environmental Protection Board in charge of their management and maintenance. We re-
introduced the regime of house-to-house sanitary inspection in the City and outskirts, inspecting some
68,856 houses at the end of 2006, initiating prosecutions and issuing abatement orders for violations
to 23,749 households.
As part of our efforts to restore orderliness to the City, we implemented a street naming and house
numbering scheme for Phases 1 and 2 of the Federal Capital City. Many people are unaware that
Abuja has a naming system for districts, expressways, streets within districts and so on. All districts
derived their names from the original Gbagyi settlements nearest to, or within the districts like
Maitama, Wuse and Garki. Expressways and parkways in the FCT were named only after former
presidents and vice presidents respectively like Murtala Mohammed (ONEX) and Nnamdi Azikiwe
Expressway (Ring Road 1). Arterial and collector roads honoured some of our founding fathers and
foremost nationalists. Each district had a street naming scheme. For instance, street names in Maitama
originate from natural features – rivers, lakes, mountains and the like. [83] Garki’s are named after
local government headquarters in Nigeria, and Wuse streets recognized African cities and so on. I
will now take a few cases of the master plan enforcement that became controversial to throw some
light on what really happened and why.
Corner Shops and Neighbourhood Centres
In the context of the Abuja Master Plan, the neighbourhood centres were the lowest point in the
hierarchy of community facilities and services within the territory. Each neighbourhood centre was to
contain at least a primary/nursery school, police station, post office, clinics and grocery shops. When
the government could not immediately construct the neighbourhood centres as planned, the Gado
Nasko administration sub-divided the neighbourhood centre plots into smaller plots – for 'corner
shops', and issued five-year licenses to develop these small shops as stop-gap measures. The
intention was to remove these as soon as conditions permitted for properly-designed shopping malls
to replace them. The plan, according to former minister Gado Nasko[84] was to withdraw the
licenses on expiration of the initial period to give way to the development of truly modern
neighbourhood centres.
Instead, corner shops assumed a life of their own and became permanent features of the FCC, going
beyond occupying neighbourhood centre plots to include the wrongful conversion of parks, green
areas, flood plains and transit way reservations. The list of corner shop allottees read like "who is
who" of Nigeria, and blighted the landscape. An interdepartmental committee on Corner Shops and
Neighbourhood Centres[85] was therefore formed to study the whole issue and make
recommendations. They reviewed and inventoried all corner shop allocations by AEPB,
Development Control and all MFCT Departments, submitting a report in August 2004. On 13th
August 2004, we published a six months’ notice in national newspapers revoking and withdrawing all
development permits for corner shops and open spaces in the FCT. [86] As our plans to remove the
corner shops progressed, I received a report from the State Director of the SSS dated 17th May, 2005
titled – ‘Imminent threat to law and order by Amalgamated Neighbourhood and Corner Shop Owners
Association in the FCT’. The association, led by one Kola Martins, had met and issued a press
statement urging us to reconsider the decision to remove the corner shops. On June 2nd 2005, we
invited all corner shop owners and tenants to a meeting and agreed on strategies for the
redevelopment of the neighbourhood centres. We restated that there would be no going back on the
decision to remove the corner shops. We persuaded those that attended that we intended to give them
the first opportunity to redevelop the locations of their business, and not take the land back for our
friends and cronies, as they had alleged.
The resolutions from the meeting were widely published in several newspapers. [87] We maintained a
standing committee to continue engagement with the corner shop owners and tenants throughout the
removal and redevelopment period. We then removed more than 1,215 such shops,
and encouraged
the licensees and occupants of the corner shops to form incorporated associations to redevelop the
plots into shopping malls that they could own jointly or as tenants-in-common, in accordance with
guidelines issued by the FCT Administration.
Abuja Investment Company prepared Prototype Preliminary Designs for the Neighbourhood
Centres to guide the associations and reduce the time taken for developing design briefs and
schematic designs. The terms of conditional grant required the associations to move to site and begin
development within six months of offer. Thereafter, they were to proceed diligently with the works to
the satisfaction of the Department of Development Control. At the time, plots similar in size and
location to those of these centres were being alienated for at least N100 million each in the open
market. We were interested in serious developers and took a decision to grant these titles in three
steps. Upon a payment of N1 million, a license to develop would be issued to qualified developers.
As soon as they begin work on site within six months of initial offer, a firm letter of offer (called R of
O in FCT parlance) would be issued when buildings reach a certain level. A firm title in the form of a
Certificate of Occupancy with a 99-year tenor is then issued upon achieving more substantial
completion.
In general, we found that the physical progress on site of the various associations at the dates of
withdrawal (more than 12 months after initial offer) fell below expectations. We therefore withdrew
the ‘licenses to develop’ for violating the terms of offer and invited other reputable business
organizations to take over under conditions that were even more stringent. Virtually all the reputable
developers had already achieved substantial progress by the time we left office.
How did these companies achieve greater progress under more stringent conditions than the
Neighbourhood Centre Associations? For us in the FCT Administration at the time, the lesson we
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