|
The just established Addis Abeba City Government
Land Development and Administration Authority Lease
Board, under the chairmanship of Mayor Kuma Demeksa,
is to hold its first meeting this week. City General
Manager, Mekuria Haile, is its Deputy Chairperson.
In the meeting scheduled for the end of the week,
the new eleven-member board would discuss what to
prioritize and what procedures to follow, sources
told Fortune.
The board members are predominantly from the General
Manager’s office, the newly established Works and
Urban Development Bureau and Trade and Industry
Bureau. As an executing institute, the Land
Development and Administration Authority is not
allowed to be member of the board, but can
participate as an advisory body.
In subsequent meetings, the board will discuss
agendas preset by the authority, which wants the
board to make decisions on incomplete cases.
These include the case of 200 companies that
deposited more than two million Birr each in closed
accounts since the Caretaker Administration, and
still are waiting to be granted the land they
requested, according to the source.
The Caretaker Administration’s lease board, whose
failure to deal with land issues had been a point of
frequent criticism, has, on average, passed
decisions on only 150 similar cases each year.
“As the new city administration expects a lot of
money from land and land-related sources, it is
expected to pass a lot of decisions,” an official
from the administration told Fortune.
The authority plans to develop 2000hct to be
auctioned in the next fiscal year. Of these,
365.4hct will be auctioned by the city
administration while the remaining will be taken
care of by districts.
Of this land, 600hct is located in the industrial
zones, 80hct along the Debre Zeit Road, in various
sites identified in the city’s master plan for
industrial purposes, as well as in city centre
renewal sites.
An employee of the authority is, however, skeptical
about the success of the plan.
The record transfer of developed lands over the past
20 years is 500hct per annum.
“The current plan is ambitious and the fact that it
(the authority) wants to transfer the lands only at
auctions will create problems in resettling the town
center dwellers,” he told Fortune.
The Kuma-led city administration, nonetheless, does
not seem to have the slightest worry about this
matter. It expects to generate 2.5 billion Br from
the auction to be undertaken at municipality level
in which the initial price for a square metre plot
will be around 3,000 Br.
The authority has submitted a 2.2 Billion Br budget
request to the city Finance and Economic Development
Bureau for its planned endeavours to ready the land
with the necessary infrastructure put in place and
to undertake other capital projects.
The authority, which had not previously asked for
budget for capital projects during the Caretaker
Administration, is one of the four infrastructures
development institutes of the city that each
requested a record high budget last week for their
plans in the coming fiscal year. |
