The essence of town planners is not unconnected with the desire to have a city well-laid out and structured for greater efficiency and aesthetics. This, experts say, will prevent a degeneration of cities into slums. However, the situation is not so in many states across the country, a situation the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP) National President, Luka Achi, blames on the indiscipline associated with disobeying professional advice of town planers. The development, according to him, has led to increasing number of casualties during natural disasters. Achi speaks on this and stresses the need for state governments to have special budgets for city master plans in this interview with OLUGBENGA ADANIKIN. Excerpts:
One of the basic roles of town planner is to prevent socio-environmental problems in the society. To what extent has your institute achieved this objective?
I was going to add, not just the primary, but the secondary in the adjustment and fulfillment of our mandates. In the association, our role has been to train professionals that do the work both in the private and public sectors. Beyond that we caution them in terms of professional ethics and ensure that standards are maintained and where issues arise in times of resource management, use and application of skills, to get an orderly settlement, including the high level like the urban areas. Our members exercise decorum and do the right things for the purposes of ensuring that not only that government policies are properly implemented, but the social life of the people gain from this decisions.
Do you consider climate change in your training?
Certainly, about two years ago we had complete compulsory training for climate change globally, nation-wide and even in local situations. We were looking at the impact of those changes on both the physical environment and the way cities are supposed to be designed to cope with disasters and other issues that are closely tied to the changes in our weather system.
Yes, we do train them to take cognisance of that and it has also impacted on our standard that we use in certain locations related to nearness to rivers, valleys and the use of trees for shading and for the type of soil that has impact on rain percolation to ensure that the way we choose our building materials go along with the local environment, so that we do not get the disasters that we have been hearing and neither do we get inconveniences in terms of road constructions and movements of goods and services.
To what extent have your members worked towards preventing the impact of natural disasters?
As I said, the standards we developed to instruct people on the best way to construct their buildings, and the permits that we give to people are some of the instruments that are employed to ensure that we avoid these disasters. For instance, if you have your land and you want to build on it, but depending on what you want to construct, we will advise you that this land is probably not suitable. But the challenge that we face is that of societal indiscipline, people seeking to do what they want simply because they own a property or they have the money to do it, but they do not consider the consequences of certain uninformed decisions. And even when you give a person a permit to do a housing development, he will rather use it for market or other development to get more money. But if they don’t follow our standards, you don’t hold us responsible.
However, we also know that there are disasters that happened that are not planned. Suddenly, a dam could burst and water spill-over or there could be a heavy downpour, those are natural things that you could not stop, or there is whirlwind and it disrupts the normalcy of a particular community, then you couldn’t hold town planners responsible for that. All we argue is that, based on studies that are conducted, in some local areas, we recommend building materials, standards, height and the orientation are usually encouraged so that even if you stretch beyond the normal limit, you can still have a flexible set of materials that can help resist to a large extent, the normal natural means of climate influence on our buildings and the environment.
Why do you think Nigerians fail to listen to professional advice from NITP?
Well, that is a very difficult one. I am not in there mind and I wouldn’t be able to say, but I want to attribute it to a number of things: first, I want to attribute it to level of literacy among the larger population, which suggests that they are not well oriented enough to acknowledge the signs of natural life, nor do they accept the relationship that exists between man and his environment. Secondly, there is this selfish desire of people to do things contrary to how things should be done as if to proof their superiority and finally, general mischief. You know crime exists whether you like it or no, people do things not because that is the right thing to do, but because they just feel they must do it and so sometime that contributes to some of the attitudes we observe.
But having said that, that is the reason our development control units in every state are doing the enforcement. You will see demolition, removal of structures and restrictions, we cancel approvals that have earlier been given or that have not been complied with, that enforcement aspect becomes the policing element of what we do to help redress. But if we are disciplined enough as a society, you don’t need somebody to tell you what to do. You should be able to respect yourself and do the right thing. But when you don’t the enforcement must come in.
How will you describe your relationship with the Ministry of Power Works and Housing, especially in achieving your programmes?
Incidentally, there is a whole planning unit in that ministry. They are also in charge of our registration council because they are the ones paying the bills, they are the ones organising the standards, they are the ones issuing policy statements about urbanisation and linking us with the United Nations’ activities related to habitats. They are also involved with infrastructure that determine changes and alterations related to services to our built environment. We do have a lot to do with them. We attend their national council meetings that they organise and that of their heads and directors. So, we have a lot to do with them because the purpose at the end of the day is to make Nigeria a better place to live in.
Are you saying that there is need for policy makers to do more…?
Certainly, that’s it, because the role of policy makers is to listen to the voice of the people they serve to satisfy their needs and look at the facts and the circumstances that require the application of resources in a judicious and more applicable and practical approach. So, at the end of the day they would be said to be leaders that are doing the right things. Not because they are in power that they do whatever they like, but it is dictated by the knowledge that every nation in the world works with, which is the principles of fairness and justice.