Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
Wudineh Zenebe
1 September 2008
Ten new district lease boards should be established within a fortnight. The city administration hopes that the new boards and the Central Lease Board combined will generate 2.2 billion Br this financial year. However, they have got off to a slow start.
Addis Abeba's ten districts are expected to have lease boards up and running within two weeks.
For the past fortnight, districts have been working on the establishment of the boards and some have already submitted lists of proposed board members to the respective district cabinets. Bekele Gebre, head of the Gulele District Works and Urban Development Office, says his district is one that has already submitted a list.
Compared to the city administration's Central Lease Board, the new organisations are going to be limited in the extent of their jurisdiction, and the ways they can distribute land.
The charter for the Addis Abeba City Administration stipulates that the Central Lease Board transfers land in four different ways: Grants in the form of awards; dedicated grants to those who invest on the type of development the administration desires; negotiations with interested developers; and auctions.
However, the district level boards will only be allowed to transfer land through auctions.
Additionally, plots in prime locations of every district are the responsibility of the Central Lease Board. This means it deals with all plots designated for the construction of more than four-storey buildings and those located by main roads.
Established two months ago, the Addis Abeba City Lease Board, which is led by Mayor Kuma Demeksa, has held only one meeting so far due to policy and strategy and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) training sessions that kept top municipality officials busy.
The administration hopes to finalize the trainings and preparations to implement BPR in the coming four weeks and get back to undertaking its regular business, including holding frequent lease board meetings.
The trend for Arkebe Oqubay's Provisional and Berhane Deressa's caretaker administrations has been to hold weekly lease board meetings.
"By September, all the district level lease boards will be established and we will start to look in to land requests regularly," Mekuria Haile, city general manager, told Fortune.
About 30,000hct of Addis Abeba's 54,000hct total is built-up, while the remainder is designated for green areas and agriculture.
Though there are no undesignated lands in the city, the administration expects the central and district level lease boards to generate 2.2 billion Br this fiscal year.
Because in the first two months, July and August, there were no decisions on land requests, there are fears that the annual target may not be achieved, a source from the city administration told Fortune.
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