How to rebuild Nigerian broken cities —Ayinde

Mr. Toyin Ayinde, a former Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development in Lagos State, is the new President of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP). In this interview by DAYO AYEYEMI, he speaks on the need to rebuild Nigerian cities, following the effects of COVID-19 pandemic and #ENDSARS protest. He also shed light on the need to increase advocacy about planning to the chief executives and policy makers.

 

MANY facilities, public transport and  real estate were  destroyed in most cities  during the #ENDSARS protest. How do we fix these  cities? 

What has happened is that even before now, we have never had very functional cities.  By the time you have congestion,  breakdown of facilities,  poor electricity  supply, lack of  free flow of water and your drainages are not functioning well, that is a dysfunctional situation .  This should be a concern. What has made this more important now is that the destruction that came as an aftermath of the #ENDSARS  protest is now putting further strain on the few things that we had.  It is not that our courts are sufficient, we need more court buildings but some of the ones we had have been burnt. It is  not that we had enough secondary schools but Kings College was burnt.  It is not that  we have enough  public transport  but you have buses being set ablaze. That’s a broken city,  and I think to underscore that the governor himself has passed an Executive Order to redevelop all  of those places.

To rebuild our broken cities, we need governance. People must move from government to governance.  Government is the institution,  governance is the spirit by which you deliver policies.  There is too much of master -servant relationship between government and people that are being governed.  The concept is them against us.  Government talks down on people. Government feels that anything they say must be obeyed.  That is not governance. They will achieve little, and that is why people talk of engaging citizenry.  When there is citizens’ engagement, we can collectively take a decision on what to do.  It is very easy for us to look for how to implement it. So far we had #ENDSARS,  there is a lot of things to end anyway: There is need to end poverty; there is need to end apathy to the feelings of youths;  and there is need to end illiteracy.

 

What is the role of town planners in the redevelopment of police stations and court buildings that were burnt?

The first thing you should realise is that those things they destroyed are components of human settlement system.  A police station is a security facility that is meant to serve a neighbourhood, a town or a city wherever they are located.  You will see that  more than 15 police stations were brought down in Lagos.  Those are urban facilities and when you begin to discuss  urban facilities, you can’t  be discussing them without a  town planner because they are interested in locations and how they  relate in their area of locations with other components of the city systems.

 

You will agree with me that COVID-19 really exposed  the unplanned nature of Nigerian cities. How can we reorder/ improve the planning of our cities with the help of town planners?

We must realise that planning profession and planners are only tools.  If you have a tool as a farmer,  you go to the farm and you refuse to use the tool,  will your land get tilled? No!  So you must realise that the planning profession and planners are tools  meant to be used.  It is for the people of a community  to understand the need to plan and   the need to predict what our environment is supposed to be like.  It is like a life.

It is like you being a journalist, you didn’t stumble into being a journalist, you prepared your mind for it. Whatever your background, the moment you made up your mind that you will go into journalism, you began to prepare for it.

That is the way human settlements ought to be prepared for and shaped into whatever you want them to be. It is the environment, we are the ones to shape it into what will benefit us. And that is where the town planners come in. If the generality of the people, especially represented by the leadership,  governors, commissioners, members of the house, leaders of thought,  if they do not express any vision it means that  they would have no desire to plan.  So whatever plan a planner puts in place,  they have no desire to implement it, and if you have a plan and you don’t implement, you are worse than a person who did not have at all, because you have even spent your money to do something that you don’t intend to use.

The issue of having cities that are not planned is an issue of a system. It is an issue of leadership that lacks vision.  And why has it been exposed during COVID-19?  It is because, there are certain elements of a human settlement that help to absorb shocks that COVID-19 brought. We needed space to build isolation centres, if you don’t have open spaces around, you won’t get space. We all saw children playing football on the tarred roads just because there is no space.  These are issues for the leadership and the system to decide.

 

What are you going to do during your tenure to drive advocacy for this?

I have helped the institute to commit to advocacy programme  since I joined the executive in 2016. Also, everywhere our president went to, we  would have town hall meetings and we made presentations. I have done that for four years because I was asked to make those presentations.  Now, I am working towards a documentary that within 10 to 15 minutes, you can play it before the chief executives. The whole idea is about planning.  I have about 40 focus groups that I intend to visit to make a case for planning.

 

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