Planners seek new master plan in Kwara State

Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP) in Kwara State has called on the new state government to prepare a new master plan for the state capital, Ilorin to avoid imminent disaster.

Speaking with journalists in Ilorin last week, NITP state Chairman, John Olayioye, said that physical development in the Ilorin city is haphazard and was not being controlled.

He said: “We’re employing the governor to 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 reduce the 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 said that physical planning should not be done with a view to generating revenue at its inception. He added, “if physical planning is done thoroughly, without revenue generation in focus at the inception, it will eventually generate revenue in future.”
 
A member of the institute, Abdulrahman Olanrewaju, said 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. He noted that the physical planning authority had only embarked on piece meal 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.