Edo State Coral City To Accommodate 50,000 Residents, Says Commissioner
By Simeon OSAJIE
The Commissioner for Housing, Urban and Regional Planning and Development Isoken Omo yesterday, 20th September, 2023 said Edo State government the Coral City which has been on for over one years now would accommodate not less than 50,000 residents when completed.
Isoken Omo, who addressed a joint press conference with her counterpart in the Ministry of Communication and Orientation, Chris Osa Nehikhare, said that the reason for the new city, which she said started September 2022, was to reduce the pressure on the Benin City Centre.
According to her, “We have done the design, and we have 1,300 plots available for different land uses: residential, commercial, multi-purpose, religious, leisure, schools, markets, health centres, everything you need for a city to thrive, and it is coming with full infrastructure like roads, drainages, power, telecommunication, and others.
“We intend to house 50,000 people when it is fully completed. We have broken the project into four phases so that within the tenure of the current administration, we will do the first phase with the expectation that the subsequent governments will continue the project. We opened for subscription with 467 plots to jump-start the project.”
To achieve that, she added that a New Town Development Authority had been set up to oversee the comprehensive development of the project and appealed to Edo residents to begin to apply for plot allocation in the new city, assuring that the land acquired would come with title documents.
She said that the project would be in four phases, adding that after the initial subscription, subscribers would also be allowed to do staggered and instalment basis.
The Commissioner also spoke about the clean and green initiative of Edo State Government which is called the grow 100. She noted that the State is doing a lot of transformation, human capital development, infrastructural transformation, developing two master plan amongst others.
“In our master plan we have set up the clean and green initiative where we are going to employ 100 young persons between 25 and 30 years of age that will start training from now. We have architect, town planners, civil, mechanical engineers, electrical and structural engineers, land and estate surveyors, builders, GIS specialist and land scalper”.
She said they will be trained in the difference aspect of the master plan, property and projects, construction management. “They will be trained at the end of one year placed with in the Civil Service to carry in with the work, as a robust training has been set up for them”.
