Ugo Jim-Nwoko
9 November 2009
analysis
The controversies associated with the state of federal roads in the southeast of Nigeria need not be re-emphasized here; and equally controversial is the level of malpractices involved in the award and execution of road contracts in Nigeria in general.
Corrupt Politicians and dubious contractors have since Nigeria's independence in 1960, ripped off the citizenry of enormous state resources that would have transformed their lives from that bedevilled by poverty to one of good quality and standard.
It would not be out of place therefore, to conclude, at the risk of sounding hasty; that the procurement reforms in Nigeria which led to the enactment of the Public Procurement Act 2007 were targeted mainly at the abuses, abandonment and violations in road contracts awards and execution. The people of the five states of the southeast constitute major victims of failed infrastructural contracts; and associated neglects.
This fate has over the years been blamed on the unwritten policy of the Nigerian state to punish the people of Igbo extraction for the failed attempt to pull out of the Nigerian federation in the last three years of the 1960's.
The Aba-Owerri Road is the focus of our discourse here, considering the centrality of the road to the daily existence and lives of the people who live and work in the southeast. The level of dilapidation that has visited the road over the years and the conspired silence that has accompanied the abandonment during these ten years of democracy is too dangerous for silence for the ordinary citizen.
It is out of sheer concern and of my involvement that people from Ngor-Okpala and Abia State, Cross Rivers and Akwa Ibom pass through Mbaise to get to Owerri and Onitsha because of the poor state of the road. This is a major threat to the business and economic interactions among Aba, Onitsha, Nnewi, Lagos and Kano critical to the economic and industrial development of the entire country.
That the Sam Mbakwe International Cargo Airport is located in Ngor-Okpala; and Aba -Owerri road is the main road through which the airport can be accessed is an embarrassment to the country as a whole in view of the fact that local and international visitors who come to Imo, Abia and some parts of Anambra, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom and Rivers States rely on the Sam Mbakwe Airport and by implication the Aba-Owerri road.
The authorities in Abuja, Imo and Abia States' should hide their faces in shame due to the menace this road has constituted to the public and commuters whose lives are daily exposed to danger
What Aba stands for in the country and the importance of access roads linking it to cities like Owerri, Onitsha and Lagos is what the Nigerian government does not need to be reminded of. The road has for long been in a state of disrepair despite the clamour over the years for its reconstruction into a dual carriageway as a result of many lives that are being lost on the road on regular basis.
The economic potentialities of Aba, popularly called the Enyimba City in terms of the industrialization of the country and the urgent need for Nigeria to achieve technological breakthrough have been ridiculed by the fact that the poor condition of the road has helped the business of kidnappers, armed robbers and hoodlums who carry out their nefarious and dastardly acts on this road both night and day. So it was cheering therefore to know recently that the contract for the rehabilitation of the road was approved by the federal executive council (FEC) on the 29th of April 2009 and awarded to Messrs. Niger Construction Company Ltd at the cost of over two and half a billion naira to be completed within 14 months.
However, despite these revelations and approvals, serious work has not commenced on the road till now. What has commenced recently is the heaping of sands in strategic locations for months now, without an accompanying serious work. One wonders why the delay in the rehabilitation of the road; and why the work going on, on the Onitsha-Owerri road is not continued on Aba- Owerri road. Going by the timeframe for the execution of the project, the road should be in its best of forms by August 2010 and the contractors should have vacated the site. But from the trend of things on ground now, this scenario will be impossible!
The following may be the likely excuses from parties to the contract: The contractors will either complain of not being mobilized to site by the government or that they are waiting for the rainy season to be over. The government may hide under the guise that they have paid the contractors and therefore do not understand why they have not moved to site or that the Niger-delta problem led to a shortfall in government revenue and therefore could not make money available to the contractors and so on! Be that as it may, these excuses will no longer be tenable in the light of the existence of the Public procurement Act 2007.
The era of using the wellbeing of citizens to play politics should be over if the spirit and letters of the Public Procurement Act 2007 are to be activated. So many federal roads and infrastructures in the southeast, particularly the ones that are central to their wellbeing like, Enugu-Port-Harcourt express road, Enugu-Onitsha express road, Aba-Owerri road and the all important and controversial Onitsha-Owerri road are instruments of scoring cheap political goals in the hands of the federal authorities among Ndi-Igbo especially when presidential elections are around the corner like the 2011 general elections.
Since after the civil war, the second Niger-bridge has been a political tool used before elections to get Igbo votes, only to be abandoned after elections.
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