| Home | Politics | Human Rights | Water | Economy | Education | Sci & Tech | Culture | Sport |
02 October, 2007
Three years after the Addis Abeba Provisional Administration passed a decision to grant residential plots to Diaspora Ethiopians the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) is undertaking the final screening of the requesters.
The plots, which are intended to hold residential houses for the Diaspora, are found adjacent to the CMC housing complex in Bole District. The District Administration has paid compensation for the relocation of 100 farmers that have settled in the area. Resettling of the farmers is pending the final decision from MoFA,
Following suspicion of inclusion of local residents in the list of the names given to the District on behalf of the Diaspora, the District Administration refrained to grant the plots and has requested MoFA to filter out those who may not be genuine Diaspora.
Based on the request advanced by the District, the Ministry has sorted out documents from seven Diaspora associations and returned the files to the District, sources at MoFA told Fortune.
According to the District, although what was left is to relocate the farmers who are already financially compensated, those whom the District would grant the plots must be identified as Diaspora.
The Ministry source confirmed that with the intent to address the issue on behalf of the District, Ethiopian embassies overseas have been receiving the dispatch to find out the individual names listed on the files provided by the District and some files have undergone cross checking before they were returned to the District.
Around 2,700 Ethiopian Diaspora who formed housing associations are to be granted 150sqm of land each, of which 50sqm would be free from lease payments. These prospective residents, have organised themselves in 143 associations, each composed of 10 to 32 people.
These associations’ requests were officially honoured during the former lease board tenure of the previous Addis Abeba Provisional Administration led by Arkebe Oqubay. However, the transitional status of the former City Administration could not have surpassed its jurisdiction to allot the specific plots for them; hence the requests were not materialised.
As soon as the incumbent City Caretaker Administration under Mayor Brehane Deressa assumed office, the Lease Board Office has made its decision to grant the plots. Although, the associations initially requested 500sqm of land, given the shortage of land in the city for residential development, the associations settled for much less than they requested.
After MoFA reached consensus with four regional states, the Ministry secured a deal for foreign Ethiopian residents who may be interested to construct houses in their respective choices of regions.
On the basis of this consensus, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPRS), out of the 863 people who requested residential plots, 142 have organised themselves in associations. Out of these, five per cent prefer to be given the plots in Hosanna town, the balance in Awassa. Since the request for the plots to build residential houses has dramatically increased over the recent past, between Monday and Friday, 136 people have been registered, sources informed Fortune.
On the other hand, in the Tigray Regional State, there are 900 people who requested plots to build houses.
Given the increasing demand of land, MoFA has put to a halt the ongoing registration of people for the request of the land in the regions until it finds ways to assess whether in fact there would be available land to grant and set mechanisms to determine how the allocation would be made.
According to the Addis Abeba City Land Development and Administration Authority, since there have not been available plots for associations, it would only be possible to grant requests for the land that have already been decided.
The plots of land in the CMC neighbourhood across from the roundabout is booming and growing in popularity becoming one of the prime residential areas of the city. This particular neighbourhood has attracted the eyes of real estate developers like Ayat Real Estate, Gift Real Estate, Sunshine Construction, Berta Construction as well as the existing CMC housing complex with 502 housing units.
As most of these big name real estate developers continually target high income clients, the City Caretaker Administration has allocated the largest share of the total 62.2hct of land allotted in the CMC area to both low and middle income condominium houses.
By WUDINEH ZENEBE - SPECIAL TO FORTUNE