Some councillors in Dowa have asked the district council to expedite the allocation of plots to people who want to develop new structures at Dowa boma, where old buildings were demolished last year (2022).
They made the call on Friday during the second extraordinary full council meeting of the first quarter of 2023/2024 fiscal year. The meeting aimed at scrutinising reports from the development committee.
During the meeting, Ward Councillor for Msakambewa East, Martin Luka, demanded to know why the council was delaying allocating plots to the public at boma market, in a place where the council demolished old structures in a move to pave the way for new infrastructural development.
“We have already detailed a layout plan for the whole issue, but we are concerned that the process of allocating plots to interested people so that they may start constructing new buildings has not yet started, and we will soon clock a year since the old structures were demolished.
“The delay is also delaying potential development of the district which may come with the new infrastructure,” said Luka, who also asked for an explanation on the alleged assumptions that the layout is a mismatch to what is on the ground.
Concurring with Luka, Councillor for Mponela, Mayamiko Kambewa, urged the local council to speed up the process.
However, in an interview with Malawi News Agency, Dowa Director of Planning and Development, Mercy Mpakule, said the allocation will be done soon as the council was taking into consideration all necessary elements to have proper and standard designs and a legal plot allocation exercise.
“Our plan with the physical planning team is to have a very good-looking town, so, we do not want any shortcuts. There are also issues with a road we want to have there, which has been delayed because of other busy engagements of our grader.
“The other thing is according to the mandate of urban planning, we must have a proper plot allocation committee, and we cannot allocate the plots without that committee. But by next week, we will constitute that committee, and then do the advertising” Mpakule explained.
She, however, said the issue of the layout plans not marrying with what is on the ground only had to do with the error margin components of some GPS coordinates, and that was what was being rectified before implementing the layout on the ground.
