NIGERIAN Institute of Town Planners (NITP) in Kwara State has called on the new state government to prepare a new master plan for the Ilorin state capital to avoid imminent future disaster.
Speaking with journalists in Ilorin on Wednesday to mark World Environment Day, the state chairman of the NITP, John Tunde Olayioye, said that development in the Ilorin city is haphazard.
The professional body, which said that development in the state capital was not being controlled, added that “everyone is just doing what he likes because there’s no master plan guiding the development of Ilorin.
“Kwara State physical planning authority is doing its best, but there’s no weapon with which to give a planned and orderly environment.
ALSO READ: PDP to APC: Don’t drag us into your crisis
“What they are just doing there is to reduce the effect of planless environment. And when an environment is not planned, there’s chaos. We have pollution because we don’t have a planned environment because the refuse we generate cannot even be evacuated, there’s no good accessibility, there’s flooding, overcrowding, and there’s everything that creates pollutants which pollutes our environment.
“In that vein, we are employing our governor to please set in motion preparation of a master plan for Ilorin city and other towns and cities in the state so that it will be able to help and reduce stress which the physical planning authority and the populace experience daily.
“People build motor parks, petrol filling stations, event centres, everywhere and there’s little the authority can do because there’s nothing guiding development.
Olayioye, who said that physical planning should not be done with a view to generating revenue at its inception, added that “if physical planning is done thoroughly, without revenue generation in focus at the inception, but with social welfare in focus, it will eventually generate revenue in future.”
A member of the institute, Abdulrahman Olanrewaju, said that the master plan being used by the state government was prepared in 1972 when there were few town planners and little development in the state, added that the physical planning authority had only embarked on piece mill approaches to development of the state since then, “just in order to curtail development going out of hands.
“Individuals, governments will pay for either physical planning or lack of it, but it is easier, attractive and more honourable to pay for planning. The money for the master plan, which may look huge to government, when compared with time wastage, and so many encumbrances, that go along with the planless environment, one would see that it is more than hundred times what government would spend on physical planning. Above all, Ilorin is the largest city in the midland of Nigeria. Whatever happens here would then encourage people to come in and eventually attract revenue in future,” he said.