By AUSTIN KALUBA –
DISORDERLINESS has become a hallmark of most cities in Zambia especially the capital Lusaka itself.
Needless to say Lusaka is one of the most poorly-planned cities in Southern Africa making the new intervention to create a spill over city in Kafue highly laudable.
The challenges in Lusaka include overcrowding, incessant traffic jams, difficulties by the city council to deliver adequate services to the ever growing population and a cocktail of problems that come with congestion.
Like Lagos in Nigeria which served both as a political and economic capital from 1914 to 1991, Lusaka is growing at an explosive rate (both economically and population-wise) calling for measures to decongest the city.
Experts have rightly noted that in 10 to 20 years time, it will be difficult to conduct any business in Lusaka due to massive congestion.
Since independence, the city has faced problems of housing, planning and unemployment, social ills which affect the political, social and economic policies, and increases pressure on the demand for urban land.
However, the government is awake to the issue of planning in the proposed spill over city and will take this aspect as an integral part to meet international standards.
The spill over city will rectify problems of town planning that previous governments failed to address in relation to population growth and investing in economic activities to sustain residents.
Since the spill over city will have dynamic commercial activities that would naturally attract people, there is need for authorities to harness this by developing other areas to contain people in sparsely populated regions in the country.
In 2014, government announced that it was going to revise the town and country planning legislation to provide a framework for planning of cities and towns considering the amount of land available for residential purposes.
It was observed that the current law on town planning has glaring lacunas and lack a clear policy and legal framework to be effective.
It is evident in Zambia that town planning has failed in its basic and traditional tenets of ensuring orderly development of cities, towns or urban centres, with 80 per cent of the houses being in formal or poorly serviced.
This is more evident in most urban areas which are all becoming a mish mash of humanity and structures placed precariously with no consideration for orderliness.
The procedures for access to land by the increasing population is has become cumbersome calling for re-planning and not planning since that stage was passed many years ago.
This proliferation of squatter or unplanned settlements has come about because residents have become desperate to gain access to the limited land.
The problems of urbanisation and its resultant problems started in the UNIP government forcing authorities to reduce rural-urban migration by developing rural industries such as the bicycle assembly plant in Eastern Province,Mununshi Banana Scheme in Luapula Province, Pineapple Factory in North-western Province and Kateshi Coffee Plantation in Northern Province
However, the challenges of a growing population goes back to the 1920s when  the urban policy in Northern Rhodesia required the creation of an urban population which was available at wages below the full costs of production and which would pose no threat to colonial administrative control.
This applied to Africans where the solution was to have a temporary urban labour force of male migrants.
By retaining wives and dependants in the rural areas, employers needed not pay full wages sufficient to cover the full cost of production.
The policy therefore was to maintain a transitory nature of urban population. Such a policy was manifested in construction of single quarters.
An example can still be found in Wusakili Township, Kitwe for African workers since the wives, dependants and children were expected to remain in rural areas and the workers were expected to return to the villages after retirement.
The employers were expected to provide housing to employees. Africans who were not employed were thus not accommodated.
As the African population was considered to be temporal and transitional, there was no concern to provide quality, standard housing.
Married quarters only came into effect as late as the 1940s, when 1948Urban African Ordinance imposed obligations on large employers – with more than 25 people.
Though the colonial urban policy that aimed at controlling the influx of Africans to the urban centres or discouraging their permanent residence was racist, its strength lay on mere control of rural urban movement.
It is this consideration that must be emulated by governments of the day considering the consequences of unbridled urbanisation.
One of the options is to re-plan all cities and even provincial headquarters to ensure they conform to the intentions of initial town planners.
This radical move should call for less political interference to ensure there is sanity in town planning.