Uthman Abubakar
5 November 2008
The reconstruction of the Abuja-Lokoja road into a dual-carriage highway is stuck in the mire of distressing paucity of funds without any end in sight. Meanwhile, horrific road traffic carnage occurs unabated there as the road remains narrow for the rapidly widening vehicular traffic.
It should make no one aggrieved that a 60-seater luxurious bus rammed into the ass of a trailer on the Murtala Bridge on the 9th of September, 2008, causing the on-the-spot death of eleven passengers of the bus and the driver's assistant of the trailer; or that just a month earlier, an 18-seater bus swerved off the road and nose-dived into the Gada Biyu, causing the death of 15 of the passengers; or that a Mercedes Benz car misshaped at a village near Kwali, causing the death of three people on Thursday, 23rd October, 2008.
It should frighten no one that two heavy haulage vehicles, like a trailer and a fuel tanker, occupy the entire width of the tarred section of the road with one overtaking the other, as a convoy of cars and buses from the opposite direction advances, all having to share the two-lane road barely wide enough for the two haulage vehicles. In this situation, the commuter vehicles must often swerve off the road, sometimes to the fringes of the bushes, clearing a lane of their own to avoid the occurrence of a most horrendous carnage.
It should also frighten no one that the terrorizing sirens of the speeding convoys of 'their Excellencies' must have the right of way on the two-lane road as a convoy of private cars and buses overtake two or three heavy haulage vehicles.
It should sicken no one that both sides of the main length of the 186-kilometre road are littered with the carcasses of vehicles of various sizes. Neither should it sicken any one that whenever a truck or a bus breaks down or is involved in an accident on the road, it causes a gridlock that lasts for hours before it eases.
All these have in the last couple of years developed into 'normal' occurrences on the road due to their enduring regularity. They are all symptomatic of the terrible problem of insufficiency of space on the road to contain and ensure safe and smooth flow of vehicular traffic according to its current status and level of essentialness.
What should dishearten everyone about the Abuja-Lokoja road on the scale of its current status as the main artery between the North on one hand, and the larger section of the South on the other, and as the main artery serving the nation's capital with the huger throngs of citizens from the southern states, is the stark reality of the fact that such accidents may persist, possibly in much graver enormity till only God-knows-when.
This fear is firmly rooted in the sharp contrast between the status of the road and the prickly dilemma and uncertainty enmeshing its reconstruction into a dual-carriage highway necessitated by its status and economic essentialness.
The contract for the reconstruction of the road, along with the Port Harcourt- Eket and Kano- Maiduguri roads, into dual-carriage highways was awarded by the Federal Government in July 2006 under a presidential initiative by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo at a total cost of N419 billion.
The 186km-long Abuja-Lokoja road, which was to gulp N40 billion, is a part of the Abuja-Abaji-Benin highway linking Abuja to Kogi, parts of the South-western, South-eastern and South-southern states. Like its contract sisters in other parts of the country, the road was divided into four segments for the reconstruction and awarded to different construction companies.
The 42km Zuba-Sheda Section I, which also covers the distance between the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport junction to Giri and including the construction of a flyover at the Giri junction, was awarded to Messrs Dantata & Sawoe Construction Company at the cost over N11.2 billion; Section II covering 57km from Sheda to Abaji was awarded to RCC Nig. Ltd at the cost of over N9.6 billion; Section III covering the 49km Abaji-Kotonkarfi distance was awarded to Bulletine Construction Company Ltd at N9.7 billion; while 50km Section IV from Kotonkarfi to Lokoja was awarded to Gitto Construzioni Generalli Ltd at over N11.9 billion.
While Dantata & Sawoe, RCC and Bulletine seem to be executing, or to have executed, at least 25 percent of the project with only the initial payment of about 11 percent of the contact cost, Gitto doesn't seem to have set foot yet on its own site. RCC seems to have since vacated site after executing whatever amount of work it could with its own initial payment, Dantata & Sawoe has said that it will stop work as soon as it has exhausted its own, while Bulletine has said that it has barely managed to transfer some funds from some of its projects elsewhere to finance its ongoing volume of work, and it will stop work as soon as it exhausts the funds.
Authoritative sources say that at the point of the July, 2006 award of the N419 billion contracts for the dualisation of the road along with its two or three sisters nationwide, the then President Olusegun Obasanjo was advised to approve the execution of the contacts in segments according to the availability of funds to avoid unnecessary breaks which may subsequently lead to their indefinite suspension or even termination before their completion due to possible paucity of funds, but he would not give such approval, arguing that the required funds would always be available.
Alas! The feared paucity of funds seems to have descended heavily on the projects and they are grinding to a standstill in a situation worsened by the bewildering dilemma over where and how to source the funds to ensure smooth execution, if the funds can be sourced anyhow and anywhere at all.
There are various options, the sources say, considered on the way forward on the roads projects. These include sourcing funds from international agencies, sourcing funds internally or, most frighteningly, suspending indefinitely the projects due to the practical unavailability of funds. Fears are raging higher that should the last option be settled for, the projects may not be revisited in the near future due to their cost-intensiveness.
Government seems at pains to accept the first option, more so as it seems heavily leaning towards the second - local sourcing of the funds under which it has already proposed a programme of Public Private Partnership in the projects and subsequent management of the roads, which principally include the re-erection of tollgates by private investors participating in the projects. This option is suffering a severe setback because virtually no private investor seems to have come forth with any level of willingness to participate. It is gathered that some of the contractors, especially Dantata & Sawoe, were approached with the PPP proposal. They have shown no interest. It is said that the banks have also shown no interest. So, sourcing the required funds locally doesn't seem possible.
Therefore, would the last option - suspending the projects until funds are available anytime in future, be settled for? All the parties concerned with the roads projects seem to dread this option because of its grave implication on the very large chunk of the North-South economic activities and the developing status of the federal capital itself - the indefinite suspension of the projects.
The contactors still doing some work on their own sections of the Abuja-Lokoja road - Dantata & Sawoe and Bulletine, do so only in anticipation of some provision for the roads projects in the supplementary federal budget currently before the National Assembly. In a broader sphere, all the contractors handling all such road projects nationwide recently complained to the Upper House of the Federal Parliament, the Senate, about the dearth of funds and threatened to abandon the projects if the situation persists.
The Federal Parliament seems leaning towards making some provision for the projects in the budget, which the government doesn't seem to accept as feasible on its part. The government leans towards sourcing funds through PPP and or other sources, which the parliament doesn't seem to accept as necessary, with most of the parliamentarians complaining that the horrible Abuja-Lokoja road leads them to their constituencies and they detest plying it in that condition.
Should government and the National Assembly fail to agree on easy and speedy sourcing of funds for the roads projects, the remaining two contractors on the Abuja-Lokoja road, could vacate site.
"We cannot achieve any target on the completion of our own segment of the road," Musa Ali, the Human Resource and Administration Manager of Bulletine Construction Company, admitted, explaining, "and this, as you may have already known, is because of dearth of the funds. Unless there is an improvement in terms of the provision of the funds, the work will continue at its current slow pace. You could observe that some of the contractors have vacated site, but we have managed to remain there."
According to the Admin Manager, "I must tell you that we have not been going at the pace we would have loved to be, we are just like trying to remain there with or without funds. It is as if there are any funds to do the work. The truth of the matter is that the Senate is trying to reroute the project to take its due process, that going through the Senate for approval. During the administration of Obasanjo, it is like it didn't go through the Senate. This is what the Senate is trying to do now. Until it does that, we are not likely to have any funds. We are aware that the Senate is working well towards that. We are confident that we shall get there."
He said the company's basic constraints are the lack of the funds to do the work. "So we cannot even talk of any contract variation now. What is most important for us now is to get the approval for the contract from the Senate. Then we put things in the right order. From there, all other things will follow. This is not to say that the little work we are doing now is not according to approval. We have been on site and we have received some payments, but we are saying is that things should be done as they should. The Presidency has the right to approve what they want. We are saying now that there is a new order, and this is the way things should be done. We have not been paid anything since this administration came. They are trying to determine the right way to do things before they make any more payment, and I think we are in agreement with that."
Accidents continue to occur unabated on the road. Muhammad Bello, a driver's assistant of a trailer involved in an accident near Gwagwalada attributed the rampant occurrence of accidents to the insufficient width of the road to contain the thickening automobile traffic.
"As a matter of fact," he spoke, "the road is too narrow. It is not possible for two heavy haulage trucks like our own to take the road at once, one overtaking the other. Even smaller vehicles find it difficult doing so safely. The truck driver faces the high risk of swerving and causing an accident in the event of overtaking."
Mohammed Jimoh resides in Abaji. He is also appalled by the rate of accidents on the road due to the heavy traffic. "Due to the traffic that is becoming too much for the narrow road, vehicles overtake recklessly, causing accidents. Accidents happen almost every day, and they claim hundreds of lives. If you don't ply the road you will not believe this, but this is the truth, because we are used to seeing them occurring almost daily. Most of the accidents are caused by trailers and luxurious buses. Most of the accidents occur at night."
According to Mr. Yomi Asaniyan, the Kogi State Sector Commander of the Federal Roads Safety Commission (FRSC), no fewer than 5000 trailers ply the Obajana-Lokoja-Abuja road to and from up North for cement haulage. "The Lokoja-Abaji-Abuja axis takes about 9000 vehicles on a daily basis between the South-West, South-East and South-South and the North. At festive periods we record nothing less than 25,000 on daily basis, which is in the day time alone. At night, it reduces to about one-third. About 23 states of the federation go through Kogi State plying the Lokoja-Abuja road."
He said the commission has to device special methods of controlling road traffic to curtail the rate of accidents on the Lokoja-Abaji-Abuja road. "We have decided to take an extra drastic action on drivers driving dangerously on this road. We have changed our pattern of operation in terms of traffic patrol. We are not doing static patrol anymore. We are doing motorized patrol, and this means you are on the road. We have a bike and patrol vehicle on the road. The bike leads a convoy. After some distance it releases the convoy. It will cruise at 110km-per-hour speed while the vehicles behind will cruise at 100km-per-hour speed. After a reasonable distance, it discharges the convoy. The aim is to control the traffic speed and convey the automobile traffic safely out of the dangerous spots on the road."
According to the FRSC commander, "Broken down vehicles not immediately removed after being involved in accidents along the road have also themselves been causing accidents because vehicles run into them at night. We now partner with the Nigeria police which has a heavy-duty truck which we use to remove obstruction on the road in the form of broken-down vehicles. All these are apart from our rescue and surveillance team which has the duty of going on the road in the evening towards the night to check if there is any broken-down vehicle on the highway for immediate removal."
The situation of automobile accidents between Abaji and Abuja, especially between the two main black spots - Gada Biyu and Gegu Beki, where the highest rate of accidents occurs, according to Mr. Joseph Ojerinde, the FRSC Unit Commander in charge of Abaji, is most horrifying.
"There are black spots because we have up-hills and down-hills whereby trailers come in with often loss of brakes, according to our experience, and dangerous overtaking leading to head-on collision as our main problems along the Abuja-Abaji section of the road. Because it is not a dual-carriage way the rate of road traffic accidents is terribly high," Mr. Ojerinde complained, stressing that because the road is the main link between the North and the larger section of the South, "definitely, the traffic volume is very very high. If I would have a say on the road, I would not suggest a 4-lane road; I would suggest a 6-lane one, because we should think of the future of the road in terms of the likely increase in the volume of vehicular traffic. I can assure you that in the next couple of years even the four lanes the road is currently reconstructed into will cease to be sufficient for the vehicular traffic volume then."
According to the unit commander, "it is very difficult to have an accident-free week here. I can only say that their severity differs. Sometimes only minor injuries are sustained by the victims, but sometimes the accidents are as fatal as claiming the lives of between 15 and 20 of passengers. We record the highest rate of accidents with the 18-seater buses. Thousands of vehicles ply this road daily depending on the time of the week. For example on Fridays, we expect heavier vehicular traffic from the Abuja axis down South as most workers go on weekends, while in the evening of the Sundays the traffic is heavier from the South up North facing Abuja as they return to their workplaces."
What a predicament for the main access road between the nation's capital city and a large section of the nation!
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