Most federal roads and highways across the country are no longer motorable having turned to death traps with multiple daily accidents, while the Federal Government refuses to rehabilitate them
Lukmon Ojerinde
David Umahi, the Minister of Works, appears obsessed with the highly controversial Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. The over N16 trillion coastal road has obviously taken the Federal Government’s attention off all the federal highways in the country since the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu government began, the act of negligence by the government has seen the decapitation of the roads which connect states of the Federation to one another.
The dilapidated nature of Nigeria’s Federal Highways is not without its consequences of transportation hardships, multiple daily accidents that result in avoidable deaths, disruptive economic activities, armed robbery, kidnappings and extortion sites for rogue security forces, both federal and state-owned security.
At the time of filing this report, checks by Tentacle showed that the roads that connect Abuja the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and Lagos are not motorable. Same apples to the roads linking Abuja and states of the South east and South south. Investigation revealed that any land journey thro and fro Abuja to any of the states in both regions can now take as long as between two to four days due to bad roads.
In the Southern regions, the roads that link Lagos to other states in the South west are mostly in a state of disrepair. So are the roads that link South east and South south to Lagos. The Sagamu-Ore-Benin Highway is an eyesore. The entire Asaba axis of the Benin-Onitsha Highway is not motorable.
The Onitsha-Owerri-Aba Expressways have been abandoned for decades. So is the East-West Highways which contract awards have been undertaken by all the democratic administrations of Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu respectively since 1999.
What worries analysts is that the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency(FERMA), a federal parastatal saddled with the responsibility of rehabilitating the federal highways has been starved of funds to function under Tinubu government. A source at FERMA disclosed that the Tinubu government does not care a hoot about the rehabilitation and maintenance of federal roads.
Sources at the Ministry of Works under Umahi revealed that all efforts about federal roads have been channel to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway for now, and unless there is a change of mind on the part of the Federal Government, Nigerians will continue to grapple with challenges of damaged federal roads until late 2026 when their repairs will be used to campaign for the reelection of Tinubu.
At the moment, sights of collapse of heavy duty trucks bearing containers and non- containerized goods from Lagos seaports in Apapa, Onne seaport in Rivers State, Idiroko Border in Ogun State among others are common. These affect economic activities negatively, causing businesses huge losses.
The coming yuletide is going to be another harvest of accidents on the federal roads if urgent action is not taken to fix them across the country. A highly placed official at the Federal Ministry of Works who pleaded anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the story, told Tentacle that the N16 trillion being expended on the Coastal Highway is enough to fix the damaged highways which are used daily by Nigerians, and also take care of a substantial parts of the Coastal Highway, which according to him, cannot be ready even in the next 25 years. The source alleged that Tinubu government cannot complete the coastal road even if it spent 16 years of four tenures.
Efforts to speak with Umahi could not yield result at the time of filing this report.
