The Clock Tower in Makeni City
By Mathew Kanu in Makeni
A team of students and professors from the Universidad CEU San Pablo de Madrid, a private Catholic university in Spain, are in the country to partner with University of Makeni, UNIMAK on the proposed sustainable urban planning.
Vice Chancellor of UNIMAK, Reverend Father Professor Joseph Alimamy Turay, said they had looked at the Makeni city and its environs and were now ready to help with planning their sustainable rural development.
“So we developed a partnership with the Madrid based CEU University of San Pablo that has the techniques in urban planningso that we can make Makeni city a sustainable city not only for ourselves but for the next generation”, he said.
He added that a team of students and professors specialized in urban planning came to Makeni last year and engaged stakeholders and staff of UNIMAK and city council on the way forward for a sustainable urban planning programme.
Professor Turay said the planningprocess would include mapping infrastructural locations, governance and the environment as well as a proper handling of waste management.
He said where to build hospitals and schools, industries, water and electricity supply facilities would be seven miles radius from within the city.
“Besides, if the population of Makeni will be one million in the next five years we should have started planning beforethat so that we will not be in chaos like Freetown is, where you have to take five hours in traffic from one location to the other or like Guma water company that was built for less than five hundred thousand people many years ago now serving over one million people,” he said.
He said all of this could have been planned many years ago so that things would not take them by surprise.
Lecturer of urban planning and coordinator of development cooperation of the CEU university of San Pablo, Professor Louis Perea Moreno, said they were in the township to work with UNIMAK and Makeni city council based on a relationship that started way back in 2009.
He said urban planning was a critical area across many African cities because of the huge expansions and the anticipated challenges. Planning, he noted, was a way to organize the different parts of acity.
“The most important thing is to get a framework of how Makeni wants to be in future. This framework should involve the villages around Makeni. Urban planning is a process we have to start now in Africa which is why we have been here in July 2013 to start the process to include villages around Makeni”, he said.
Chief administrator of Makeni city council, AlhajiAlhaji Bangura, said the CEU San Pablo University in collaboration with UNIMAK had conducted a study to have a sustainable development plan for thecity.
“This process of planning the city is a participatory one because the villages that will be part of the seven miles radius includeMasongbo and Makarieon the Freetown/Makeni highway and Makambovillage on the Magburaka/Makeni highway and Binkolo village on the Makeni/Kabala axis”, he said.
Civil society activist and Campaign for Good Governance project officer, Harold Kamara, said from their perspective it was a very good initiative because planning the city would attract investors and promote business initiatives that would develop the economy in that part of the country.
“If we have a well-planned city there will be no traffic congestions and no street trading in the city. Our role as civil society activists is to help inform the people of Makeni on the importance of town planning”, he assured, and urged all to support the process.
(C) Politico 16/01/14
