• Urges FG to integrate urbanisation into national development planning
Following Biden administration’s plan to implement its strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria, by rebalancing urban hubs and engaging with partners on urbanisation efforts, the UN-Habitat Officer in charge of Anglophone West Africa, Dr. Omoayena Odunbaku, has urged the Federal Government to integrate urbanisation into national development planning as a cross sectoral driver of growth and transformation.
The Head of the United States presidential delegation to the recent Bola Tinubu inauguration, United States Under Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Ms Marcha Fudge, had said its government would demonstrate a renewed commitment to subnational capacity building and harness existing inter-agency tools and capabilities to unlock the region’s urban potential and foster thriving, green, resilient cities and infrastructure.
Fudge, who also highlighted that a key tenet is to rebalance urban hubs, identified the shared priorities as including economic growth, increasing trade and investments, supporting democratic institutions, advancing human rights, counting terrorism and insecurity and tackling climate change.
Odunbaku, who spoke as an urban planner, said this neoliberal relevant education and policies have negative ripple effects that have continued to deny Nigeria from benefiting from the dividends that sustainable urbanisation has to offer. “Concentration of urban population allows for agglomeration of economies, technological innovation and specialisation across a range of areas including transportation, industrialisation, Information and Communication Technology, education and health.
“African urban settlements have the potential to accelerate infrastructural development, increase revenue collection, improve service delivery through adoption of innovative approaches to resource mobilisation, building alliances with strategic partners, creation of specialised clusters for provision of goods and services.
“However, we have continued to see the concentration of this population mostly in particular settlements due to the pull and push factors. Rebalancing hubs would create room for competition amongst urban centres and less pressure on the infrastructure facilities like Lagos, thereby creating new urban hubs to cater for the population,” she said.
She explained that urbanisation should be properly planned to enhance economic, social and physical growth and sustainable development, adding that the recently completed Nigerian Urban Development Policy explicitly outlines how to harness the dividends of urbanisation.
“Nigeria is urbanising at a very rapid rate with a significant proportion of its inhabitants living in different categories of urban areas. Unfortunately, the urban concept is not given the needed priority necessitated for the desired continental growth and this omission is reflected in the inability of relevant stakeholders to harness the potential of urban areas for enhancing and driving growth and development via regional, as well as national programmes and policies.
“Most of the economic activities and change that has led and can still lead to significant development in Nigeria are located within the urban scape; hence, if we are to rethink capitalism in Nigeria by conscious efforts of diversifying the economy, it is imperative to consider holistically urban development, urban economics, urban governance and management,” she said.
According to her, integrating the socio- economic determinants that influence the spatio-temporal will enable the country develop and implement both economic and spatial plans that complement each other and reduce poverty, improve environmental management, promote security, prevent slum development and urban sprawls, enhance aesthetics and increase attractiveness.
It will also provide access to basic services, improve urban governance, promote equality, establish strong settlement linkages, regional balance and promote equity. This integrated planning will ensure proper spatial distribution, balanced provision of infrastructure, proper policy formulation and implementation, social equity, settlement linkages and territorial balance among others.
Odunbaku said Africa must develop contextualised strategies, not undermining the intervention of external potential partners. “Urban hubs are human settlements with urban characteristics such as high population density, good and efficient transport networks, business districts, heterogeneous ethnic composition, innovation, agglomeration of economics, high concentration of formal jobs, the rebirth is the one that doesn’t decouple spatial and economic planning,” he said.
She argued that inhabitants of urban areas across Africa are continually recipients of these Government policies which are usually based on neocolonial and neoliberal ideas, populist ideologies, imposed policies and programmes by politicians and international multilateral agencies.
“These responses usually based on utopian ideologies, relevant data and lack the ideal level of citizens engagements to ensure positive trajectory for growth and development, which often led to monopolistic urban concentration and markets associated with surfeit of harmful socioeconomic consequences such as fostering poverty, exclusion, crime, juvenile delinquency, lack of physical and social infrastructure, unemployment, deterioration of income and increased cost of living,” she added.
