Plans afoot for urban villages

 By MALUM NALU

PLANS are afoot to transform problematic and eyesore squatter settlements in towns and cities into well-planned urban villages, National Housing Corporation managing director John Dege says.

Dege said that yesterday when supporting Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s idea of squatters living in illegal settlements in urban areas being offered land titles to build their own homes.

“The only way forward for this country, to assist our citizens who are living in settlements, is for us to issues titles,” Dege said.

“What we basically need to do is to carry out proper sub-divisions of the land the settlers are squatting on and from the sub-divisions we can supervise the alignment.

“We will try to assist them to build better houses with the current trend, in which stakeholders are developing housing schemes, particularly for public or social housing programmes.”

Dege stressed the idea was not to “chase” people from squatter settlements. “What we would like to see is conversion of squatter settlements into urban villages,” he said.

“We’d like to bring in proper services, proper sanitation, proper water, proper electricity and allow them proper titles so they feel that they own part of their own heritage.

“It is the Government’s responsibility to do that and we have been doing that in a pilot project with the National Capital District Commission at the 8-Mile Settlement.

“What we have been basically doing is we are doing awareness whereby people who are current settlers or labelled as settlers are being told that we will do proper sub-divisions.

“With proper sub-divisions we will be able to issue them with titles.

“We want to supervise; we want to put in proper road networks, proper institutions like health and clinics, education, police barracks.

“Those places, which occupy massive land, we’d like to bring in services and make them more urban villages, more formal, where a settler can take his title to the bank and get a loan to build a proper dwelling.

“We should not go around chasing people. The Prime Minister’s intention is noble, and we, as government agencies responsible for housing and land, will have to work together.

“We have to make sure that our settlers – some of whom are lawyers, accountants, doctors, and other professionals who are forced to live there because of high real estate prices – can have access to titles.

“At Durham Farm, 30 per cent of the tenants will be settlers and the land will be properly sub-divided and services brought in.”