The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola has blamed past governments for not effectively utilising earned crude oil revenue to develop road and other infrastructures in the country.
The minister said this on Monday in Abuja while presenting a three-year scorecard of his ministry. Fielding questions on the poor road networks, Fashola admitted it saying, “Yes, we know they are bad. There is no magic to it. If those who came before us had done their work, we won’t meet bad road. That is the simple truth. We earned $100 per barrel of crude oil for about five years.
“We knew what other countries like Abu Dhabi (UAE), Saudi Arabia did with their own, what did we do with ours? So this is a President and a government that is now trying to do more with less that it has. So give us some time, we will get there,” Fashola said.
The minister said the federal government is executing road projects across every state especially abandoned projects like the Lagos – Ibadan expressway, the second Niger bridge, Enugu- Port Harcourt road, Jebba-Mokwa way among others that have drastically cut down travel time.
The ministry also gave statistics of road projects in the last three years. It said in 2016, 277 kilometres of road was constructed, 345km was rehabilitated and 17,749 people were employed in the process.
For 2017, the federal government constructed 488 roads, rehabilitated 256 others and engaged 31,227 persons. For 2018 till November, 497 km of road has been constructed, 284 rehabilitated and 30,402 persons employed; the figure could rise during December due to more rehabilitation projects nationwide, officials said.
Expantiating on this, the Permanent Secretary (Works and Housing), Mr Mohammed Bukar said there have been award of 365 roads for construction since 2001. He said the Buhari government awarded 121 of these in three years while the previous government awarded 144 others in the whole of 17 years.
“You will see that out of the 365 roads, 144 were awarded in the period of 17 years while in just three years, we awarded 121 roads, just within three years and we are still counting because the 2018 procurement is on-going,” Bukar noted.
