Agency Set To Deliver Affordable Housing In FCT

The Satellite Towns Development Agency (STDA) has expressed its determination to ensure that residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have access to affordable housing, as it has planned to develop satellite towns and infrastructures.

Making this known while speaking to newsmen in Abuja, last Thursday, the agency’s director, Mr. Tukur Bakori, said that the agency had planned to develop more satellite towns with adequate infrastructure in the territory.

He said that the agency had commenced the infrastructural development of Wasa Abuja, where plots of land would be allocated to cooperative societies for allocation to their members.

According to him, these cooperative societies predominantly have people from the middle and low classes of the society as their members, and that the strategy will enable them to have access to land.

Bakori said that the STDA had improved on the sanitation of the satellite towns through the “clean and Green initiative” and provision of traditional dumps.

“We have achieved sanitation of the satellite towns through the Clean and Green Initiative, as well as provision of traditional dump sites. We have also improved on the management of these dump sites and in distilling the drainage system, this explains why no new incident of flooding was recorded in the FCT this years”, he said.

Bakori, however, said that the STDA had prioritised its projects due to limited resources which he said are properly articulated.

He said “we have decided to prioritise and complete existing projects as fast as possible. For now, we don’t have any new projects so that we can manage our resources.

The agency’s director also said “some of our priority projects include the Karshi-Apo Road, which will check traffic logjam in the Nyanya- Mararaba axis, and the Kuje-Gwagwalarden road”.

Bakori said that the benefits of such prioritization of STDA’s projects would manifest by 2014 when existing urban renewal projects in the satellite towns will have been completed.

He, however, said that the STDA would be more effective in its service delivery, if the bill establishing the agency is passed into law.