Tears For Our Roads

MINISTER of Transport Deziani Allison-Madueke must have realised by now that her tears would not be enough to get Nigerian roads to a useable state. All the defences about the rains being the reason for non-repair of the roads have collapsed. The rains are gone, the roads are still bad.
Bad roads hugely account for the carnage on our roads. The Federal Road Safety Corps in its latest figures has annual estimates of 48,000 deaths from accidents. The figures only represent deaths at scenes of accidents. The statistics do not capture those who die in hospitals, or outside the vicinity of the accidents. In real terms, the figures are bound to be much higher.

Only few of our roads are exceptions to the general decay that appears to be the national standard. What is very clear is that the contractors and their supervisors have done a poor job of repairing the roads. It may also be true that a profound approach has not been found for the funding of the country’s road network. The billions of Naira spent on the roads in the past eight years bore little fruit. Worse still, little effort has been made to find out what went wrong, an important aspect in the search for a new direction.

Stretches of abandoned road projects litter the country. We think that the Minister can do something about the situation. The bad roads were inherited from the previous administration, but the present government has to fix those roads. No excuses are acceptable for the state of the roads.

A first step for the Minister could be to ascertain what happened with the hundreds of road contracts that were announced after every Federal Executive Council meeting. There is hardly any major road in the country that was not awarded for repair in the last eight years. Almost all of them were poorly done, or are still under repairs without gladdening results.

The best example is the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway that has been under repairs since 2000. Prominent patches of pot holes follow every little part of the road that is tarred. The Minister must get all the details on these roads. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and Lagos-Ore-Benin Expressway, easily the busiest roads in the country, are famous for the number of accidents on their undulating surfaces, which also harbour many failed portions.

Who are the contractors? What were the details of the contracts? Did the contractors meet the terms of the awards? Did the government meet its financial obligations to the contractors?
The way things are, she may have no alternative than to call in the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. The issues at stake are high economic crimes that should be investigated and punished.


It is important that the Minister wades through these details quickly in order to commence the repair of the roads. Some of the contracts may need to be revoked, others may have to be funded, while new contracts have to be awarded. She has to start immediately.