The Addis Abeba City Roads Authority (AACRA) has said that the slow progress of districts in dealing with right of way issues is slowing down road projects. The accusation was hurled at a meeting of stakeholders chaired by Deputy Mayor, Abate Sitotaw, while districts fired back that the Authority keeps changing its designs and demands.
The meeting took place on December 11, 2015, at Desalegn Hotel, with participants including consultants and contractors, utility providers, district officials, representatives of residents, and the Roads Authority.
AACRA has 187 projects in progress, for which it has asked districts to settle right of way issues involving 1,879 houses and fences. So far the districts have demolished only 360. Its annual report, which was presented at the meeting, accused districts of negligence for considering the demolition as additional work.
Gullele District had started demolition work as per the Authority’s request. But for Lealem Tesera, an executive officer at Gullele District, the big problem was the Authority changing its designs over and over again.
“With the changing designs, the amount of demolition work AACRA requires also changes even on the same building,” he said.
Other districts voiced similar problems.
Gullele alone, the Authority said, has 70 houses that are marked but not demolished, while 220 are only recently under preparation for demolition. Kirkos District has yet to deal with 538 right of way issues concerning houses and fences.
Also in the blame game are the utility companies which are claiming that the slow demolition process has not taken care of their lines in the marked areas.
Ethio-telecom has moved only 217 fixed-line network cables, of the 909 it was requested by the Authority to relocate. The Addis Abeba Water & Sewerage Authority has shifted only 4.32km of pipelines out of the 23km requested, while the Ethiopian Electric Utility (EEU) has relocated 563 of the requested 1,876 poles along with their underground cables. The remaining relocation has not been done, the utilities said, either because the demolition has to take place first or simply because they have not been informed of the district’s readiness.
EEU contended that it is hard to relocate transformers or poles unless fences are shifted or houses are demolished. The scope of the work involving EEU is also so large that it cannot all be undertaken at the same time without disconnecting service to a lot of customers.
“Forty-five projects that need the utilities’ collaboration require 1,300 new poles and over 800 transformers,” said Mesfin Berihane, executive officer at EEU, adding, “that makes it a big project.”
What worried the ethio telecom representative was not the scale of the operation at all but that the Authority does not communicate properly.
“We sometimes do not get the request you are talking about,” he said.
It was said that the Authority either contacted the wrong people in the utility’s structure or just sent its letters incorrectly addressed.
He also added that all the design work and at least 80pc of the demolition should be accomplished before ethio telecom is asked to relocate cables.
During the meeting the Deputy Mayor made reference to the topical and troublesome Master Plan.
“Designs are made according to the Master Plan and they need to be approved by the Plan Institute before construction work could begin,” Abate told Fortune. “The Institute could approve deviations from the Master Plan,” he said, adding that the designs have contributed to the dispute between the Roads Authority and the other stakeholders.
“This is nothing but lack of skilled manpower in designing, which we need to work on,” he continue. “The consultants themselves should not be negligent as they should take full responsibility for the problems.”
The participants will again meet on January 14, 2016, when the Deputy Mayor will report on their performance based on the outcome of this month’s meeting.
There are 23 projects that have lagged for over a year because of 83,831 right of way issues; 20 of these are undertaken by AACRA itself. Among the 187 projects that are currently underway, 115 are main roads, while 49 are roads within condominium sites. There are also 31 bridge constructions and six road rehabilitation projects.
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