Weak urban planning in Lusaka

Zambia: Lusaka Floodwater Has Nowhere to Go
AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA
The reason why Zambia's urban poor have had to wade through ankle-deep water for weeks on end is as much down to human error as the torrential rain that has hammered the country: in a word, drainage. "The floods [in the capital, Lusaka] are a clear indication of our weak urban planning system, because there is no way water should fail to sink away over a period of three weeks if the drainage system was properly done," Douglas Katengo, former president of the Zambia Institute of Architectures, told IRIN. "All the affected areas are informal settlements, and if proper planning had been done for their existence, there would have been proper services." Zambia has been soaked by heavy downpours since the last week of November 2007. In rural Southern and Eastern provinces, flooding has displaced thousands and drowned crops. In Lusaka, it has also brought misery: schools and clinics have been affected, homes stay waterlogged, and there is fear of an outbreak of cholera ... Holland Mulenga, a property consultant, said, "This is more about lack of proper forward planning which takes into consideration the expanding towns. If we had proper planning, and a planning authority in the first place, the law should have been enforced to ensure social services were properly provided and these floods wouldn't be as bad as they are now." Most residential areas in Lusaka developed haphazardly from unplanned informal settlements ... Zambia's formal sector generates only 400,000 jobs, and all most three-quarters of its people subsist on US$1 or less a day, according to the government's Central Statistical Office. Informal settlements provide the only accommodation Zambia's urban poor can afford."I left my home village in Chipata [a town in Eastern Zambia] to come and look for a job here ... I haven't found that job, so my family sells vegetables and tomatoes at the market, but everything is now disturbed because of the floods," said Ganizani Tembo, who lives in Lusaka's Misisi township ... Zambia's vice-president, Rupiah Banda, told local media the government had earmarked US$4 million to mitigate the impact of the floods in the capital. "[It] is worse than earlier estimated ...