Lagos — Chairman of the Lagos Business School and one-time Presidential aspirant, Professor Pat Okedinachi Utomi, has said that Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, FERMA, has totally failed in its mandate to maintain roads in the country.

Utomi, who spoke in Lagos wondered why the agency has not lived up to its billing despite the huge revenue the Federal government purportedly gave it to rehabilitate the roads.

"As recent as just last week, we learnt that the Honourable Minister of Works was caught up in one of the notorious snarl-up of the Benin-Sagamu Expressway. I daresay that this is a fitting irony, as the minister would be better able to appreciate the hardship people routinely undergo when making their way on this road, since they, unlike the minister could not afford air travel. It is no longer a strange story that people have spent up to two days making their way through this route for a journey that used to take just a few hours when the road was newly opened. "It has become a recurring problem every year and would invariably force itself into national consciousness for all the wrong reasons, in the next few weeks when there would be heavy vehicular traffic on it for the Christmas/New Year Holidays. And all these in the face of the huge amount this government has reported itself to have expended, not only on it, but on all other federal roads."

According to him, the ills besetting the maintenance of roads in the country would have been solved if Nigeria had embraced true federalism.