Planning and the political process - Sifting some underlying issues in the development of Abuja, Nigeria's new capital

Planning is part of the political process, the process of identifying and deciding those wants a society's available resources should be used to satisfy. This paper examines the interplay between planning and the political process, using, as a case study, a contemporary Nigerian experience-the building of a new federal capital city. It finds that, while there are practical planning reasons for relocating the seat of the federal government from Lagos to Abuja, the human and political factors mostly explain the modalities adopted and the results so far achieved in the pursuit of this objective.