Addis Abeba City Administration’s Land Development & Management Bureau has momentarily stopped receiving manufacturing industries’ land requests.
For the past two years, the City Administration has received around 900 land requests from manufacturers land requests and has been able to allocate land for only 60 of them. Currently, due to the certain trends in land requests, starting from February 23, 2015 the city’s Land Development Management Bureau has been forced to take time out and revise the proposals as well as the land allocation directives.
“Presently, most of the land requests on our hand are for plastic recycling manufacturing and this has pushed us to examine the economic value of the business in general as well as the way we can prioritise and balance it with other sectors,” said Markos Alemayehu, communications officer for the City’s Housing Development & Urban Renewal Agency.
Since October 2014, the City Administration decided to decrease its reliance on the land allocation system and announced an auction for 60 new plots of land designated for industrial use. In 2013/14, the City Administration had transferred 1,402ha of the 3,000ha it made available for auctions. The largest number of plots, totalling 723ha, was allocated for building condominiums, followed by 175ha for industrial purposes and the remaining 52ha plots were transferred to private developers.
The city receives 30 to 40 proposals on a daily basis from prospective developers, according to an official from Land Development & Management Bureau, although the new decision means that such applicants will be disappointed. Between July 2014 and February 2015, the City had a plan to allocate 150ha land plots for industrial purposes but had transferred only 9.18ha plots.
An employee at the City Administration close to the case said that they did not know when they would again commence processing new requests for land from manufacturing industries, and the will not say what kinds of change will be suggested to the City’s cabinet.
In 2013 the Administration issued a directive that guides the land distribution scheme in two ways, auctioning and allocation. Before that, the city allocated land plots through a system of negotiations, drawing of lots, and rewards. The relevant government directive allows land allocation to manufacturing industries, spiritual institutions, non-governmental organisations, and governmental institutions as well as for projects deemed to bear special significance for the nation.
The land allocation system had developers first submitting their request to the Mayor’s Office, which then referred their requests to the City’s Land Bank & Transfer Office through the Land Development & Management Bureau. After that, projects were evaluated by a committee comprising three experts, whose decision went to the Land Bank & Transfer Office first and finally to the cabinet for final decision after the land to be allocated was prepared.
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