Still On FG Roads Maintenance

I have always heard people complain about the deplorable state of Eleme/ Onne axis of the East/West road. A friend working with an oil services company in Onne cannot stop lamenting the ordeal she and her colleagues pass through daily to go to work and return home. Most of the time she leaves the house before 6:00am to be able to navigate the bad road and get to the office in good time. While she is lucky sometimes, she is  often caught up in the traffic caused by the terrible roads, making her to arrive late at her work place.
Last week, I had a personal experience of what my friend and other road users go through every day on this road. We were in an Eleme bound bus. It was a smooth journey until we got to Akpajo junction.
Initially we thought it was the usual rush hour traffic but lo and behold! it was a gridlock.  The Elelenwo/Akpajo/Eleme/Onne stretch of the East/West road was completely blocked, causing traffic jam for about  six hours. Thus we spent over a quarter of the day on a journey of less than 30mins.
It is a shame that an important road as this should be allowed to remain in such a deplorable state year in, year out. This is a road that leads to key companies to the nation’s economy. Yet the Federal Government is not bothered that the poor state of the road could lead to poor productivity as immeasurable man-hours are lost in traffic, while the national economy suffers incalculable losses as a result.
But for the prompt intervention of the state governor, Barr. Nyesom Wike,  the country would have been today counting her losses as a result of an industrial action embarked upon by the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Petroleum Tanker Drivers(PTD) branch, few months ago over the terrible spots of the roads leading to depots and tank farms on the East/West road and Port Harcourt /Aba road.
According to the State Chairman of PTD, Comrade Lucky Etuokwu, the deplorable condition of the roads has led to loss of lives, damages to the drivers’ trucks, including loss of products and many more.
Kudos to the governor, who barely 24 hours into the strike,  summoned a meeting of the leadership of NUPENG. He nipped the industrial action in the bud and  promised to visit the bad roads and commence filling the very bad spots. Recall that that was not the first time tanker drivers and oil company workers were down tooling over the poor state of the road.
According to Etuokwu, his union had repeatedly appealed to the federal government to fix these federal roads, which he described as death traps, all to no avail.
Indeed, the Federal Government has not lived up to expectation on matters of road construction and maintenance.  Virtually all the federal roads, all the highways in the country are in sorry state.
From Onitsha/Enugu/Port Harcourt Road to Lagos/Ibadan Expressway, East/West Road to Okene/Lokoja/Abuja Road, the story is the same. Death traps everywhere.
They become more dangerous in the rainy season as vehicles break down; heavy-duty trucks overturn or get stuck in the mud. Criminals also take advantage of the bad sections of the roads to ambush road users plying the routes.
The worst thing is that every year billions of naira is budgeted for road construction and maintenance, yet there is little or no evidence of the money spent.  Not even the setting up of the Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA), charged with the responsibility of adequate maintenance of federal roads could help the matter.
Governors, on the other hand, hide under the excuse that the roads belong to the federal government to neglect them. Some of them claim that the huge sum they spent in repairing some portions of Federal roads were not refunded by the federal govrnment, thereby discouraging them from doing more.
On his Eid-el-Fitri message to Muslims a few weeks ago, the former Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, observed thus:  “Even the idea of having federal roads in towns and cities has become outdated and urgently needs revisiting. This means we need to tinker with our constitution to accommodate new thoughts that will strengthen our nationality”.
Similarly, the 36 governors at their monthly National Economic Council (NEC), last Thursday, pleaded with the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government to hand over federal roads in various states to the state government, saying they would get a strategic plan on how to rescue the  dilapidated federal roads.
Perhaps, these pieces of advice should be considered by the authorities. Let the States assume ownership of the roads in them so that the citizens can demand responsibility from their governors on their maintenance.
But the question still remains, since the state governors know the solutions to the poor state of the federal roads, why haven’t they applied such solutions to even worst roads in their various states?

 Calista Ezeaku