Road Network: South East A ‘Rat Hole’ — FENRAD

A civil right group, Foundation for Environmental Rights Advocacy and Development, FENRAD has decried the state of roads in the South East region of Nigeria, describing it as a ‘rat hole’.

According to the group, the continued neglect of the roads – especially as the Yuletide season approaches – constitutes a serious threat to life and limb; businesses also.

While noting that the majority of these federal roads, which have now become abandoned projects were conceived, in most cases, before 2015 and were equally captured in previous federal budgets, FENRAD in a statement signed by Comrade Nelson Nnanna Nwafor, the Executive Director further noted that these remain derelict and bare without tar coating.

He explained that this situation, as bad as it is, makes accidents imminent as December approaches – when usually sons and daughters of the region within Nigeria and in diaspora return home for the season’s celebrations and festivities.

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He said, “Since 2017, Otuocha-Anam-Kogi road has yet to breathe after it was abandoned. The federal minister of works and housing, Babatunde Fasola, SAN had visited Aba-Ikot Ekpene and Enugu-Port Harcourt roads on many occasions with promises, (re)affirmations, and (re)assurances of federal government’s willingness to fix the roads yet work still remains tardy and delayed to date. While the Enugu-Okigwe-Umuahia axis of the Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway could be said to be fair, the Lokpanta spot (precisely Umuchieze area) remains yet a hellhole! The Aba-Port Harcourt end of the entire project is a mess and has impinged on the ease of doing business, causing serious problems to livelihoods, even. Time and time again, vehicles – worst of these sights being latched and unlatched containers and other articulated lorries – fall along the major thoroughfare or by the wayside hindering communication, vehicular and human movements. Equally, do many of such vehicles break down due largely to the muddy and sorry plight of the road. This has become an everyday story. Sad story, too.

“The Onitsha-Awka road, FENRAD recalls, once was impassable so much so that motorists and other road users devised a route through nearby villages. This too is not peculiar to that road as many other federal roads are in the region were owing to their deplorable state daily commuters and travellers suffer this plight with needless prolongation of already torturous and arduous journeys.

“Aba-Ikot Ekpene road has remained “work in progress” for yonks and eons. Many small scale enterprises including some large scale businesses like filling stations, FENRAD notes, have gone under. That road is crucial to the region because it connects Aba, the industrial hub of the Southeast to Akwa Ibom thence to Cross River State from where the Aba manufactures feed through to as far as Cameroon markets! This is a serious setback to not only local but international trade beyond West African subregion!

“Another nightmare is 9th Mile-Makurdi road which links the Southeast to the Middle Belt region of the country. At a time it was a theatre for armed robbers. Onistsha-Enugu express road remains yet a metaphor for abandonment as the forlorn look of that road speaks volumes of competent neglect. FENRAD wonders what the federal government had been doing SUKUK Bonds which it has held for years. FENRAD, however, laments that at a time, the sum of N16.75 bn (SUKUK Bond) was set aside to rehabilitate Onitsha-Enugu expressway and also for rehabilitation of sections 1, 2, and 3 of Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway with nothing to show for all this to date. Release – in the way of money too – was made through Presidential Infrastructural Development Fund, PIDF for the Second Niger Bridge, completion of which had tarried like the second coming! Never, FENRAD recalls, was any of the said projects completed in record time as almost all are lying fallow in some cases.

“While FENRAD bemoans the plight of federal roads, it also decries the state of ruin some state roads are in too. FENRAD is in the know and privy to the fact that state governments receive monthly allocation from the federal accounts allocation committee, FAAC, and also through the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC (for the regional states of Abia and Imo, that is) yet many roads within the five states making up the region are still waiting for repairs, even construction.

“States under the existing arrangements have access to World Bank’s RAMP (Rural Access Mobility Project) to help them build arterial access and linkage roads across rural areas to enable local (mostly agricultural) produce find market in cities and as well bridge the demographic disparity and gap noticeably hindering urban and rural commercial nexus/exchange/flow. FENRAD urges the five state governors to live up to the Infrastructural needs of their people; to even intervene in some of the federal roads where and when event is right.

“FENRAD calls also on Southeast senators and Representatives (the so-called Southeast legislative caucus) to see that it does its utmost putting pressure on the federal government and also lobbying where necessary to ensure that the roads are done to boost, revitalize and reawaken many slumbering businesses.

“It is damnable that of all the six geopolitical zones across the nation, the federal roads in the Southeast remain hell and deathtraps given the crater-sized potholes dug by sheer neglect, the allure of death”.