Kisumu Governor Prof. Anyang Nyong’o has stated that schools in the city center will be relocated to the outskirts of the lakeside city to make better use of the prime land on which they sit.
Prof. Nyong’o told journalists in Nairobi on Wednesday that his government was looking into ways to make schools share amenities in order to save land for commercial use.
“Considering the value of the place, that land needs to be useful. We need to construct an integrated urban centre rather than schools,” said the governor.
“Each school has a field, a swimming pool and other amenities that have occupied large parcels of land. Why don’t we take them to an area where schools share amenities? We don’t need to have a field for each school in a town.
“Five schools can have one field because they don’t use it all the time. Students from school A can use it the morning and in the afternoon school B brings its students,” he added.
The colonial-era Kisumu Boys High School, which is set to be relocated to the Kibos area, is one of the institutions that will be affected.
Kisumu Girls High School, Manyatta Arabs School, Kisumu County Referral Hospital, the main bus terminal, and the city’s Jua Kali market are among the others.
A plan unveiled last year shows that the Kisumu County Referral Hospital will at the same time be merged with the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital.
The county boss said the city land should be used for commercial purposes by setting up profit-making establishments.
“ASK showground is an area of about 100 acres. It used to have a show of two weeks in a year and the rest of the year the 100 acres remained idle in the center of the city,” said Nyong’o.
“And now an investor has built ultramodern convention center and the other one has expressed interest in constructing a hotel around the stadium.”
The governor was speaking in advance of the 2022 AfriCities Summit, which will take place in Kisumu from May 17 to 21.
The theme of this year’s convention will be ‘The role of intermediary cities in Africa in the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030 and the African Union Agenda 2063’.
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