NIGERIANS have just been reminded that the roads they ply predispose them to torture, suffering, and insecurity. During a recent plenary, the Senate succinctly captured public anguish over the ghastly state of the roads. From Lagos to Kwara, Enugu to Rivers, Niger to Kaduna, and Benue to Adamawa, federal highways are in complete shambles, militating against commerce, movement of produce and fuelling insecurity at bad sections.

For the Senate, the situation demands an emergency. Up to a point, the upper legislative chamber is right. Its primary reason, however, is that airfares have gone up by 63 per cent, an economy class ticket now costing between N50,000 and N80,000 for a one-hour flight. Still, by linking the much-needed emergency road construction to the hike in airfares, the Senate makes a mockery of a debilitating national malaise. It demonstrates the elite’s disconnect with the pain of ordinary Nigerians.

Airfares are steep because aviation fuel is being imported and is denominated in dollars. If Nigeria were to refine its abundant crude oil, airfares would likely be more stable. Thoughtlessly, Nigeria does not refine its own crude product. The senators should realise that if this gaping, self-afflicted flaw remains, air travel will continue to be prohibitive in Nigeria.

Indeed, road and air transportation are parts of (the transportation) whole; one should not be neglected. In a rounded economy, air travel cannot replace road travel and vice versa, which means they should be developed together. Nigeria urgently needs an emergency response to roads, irrespective of airfares. The National Assembly should partner with the executive branch to make it happen.

The Infrastructure Concession and Regulatory Commission states that of Nigeria’s 195,000 kilometres of roads, about 35,000km are federal roads. Out of this, a chunk is dilapidated owing to years of poor/non-maintenance. Others have collapsed outright. In 2021, truck drivers blockaded a long portion of the federal highway in Niger State, claiming the road had failed totally. Since late 2021, petroleum tanker drivers have served notices of a strike because of the decrepit roads they ply, causing their vehicles to overturn, catch fire and expose them to highway robbers.

All along, successive Nigerian governments, including the incumbent regime of the President, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), have ignored the brutal indicators of the neglect. Some cases will suffice. One of them is the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, described as the country’s most important artery. Inexplicably, it has been under reconstruction since 2004.

In that period, Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, and Buhari (since 2015), have been president in succession! Just 127km, the road is nowhere near completion despite billions of naira allocated on paper to the project. A promise to fast-track the completion of the highway (along with the Second Niger Bridge and the Abuja-Kaduna Expressway) when three foreign governments released $311 million, part of the Sani Abacha loot in 2020, is shrouded in opacity. Not only that, the Sagamu-Benin Expressway, the East-West Road that spans the Niger Delta, the Ibadan-Oyo-Ogbomoso-Ilorin Expressway and several other highways seem to have remained uncompleted many years after. This is a bitter reality for travellers, tourists, and businesses.

Conversely, at a cost of $8.5 billion, Egypt built its New Suez Canal project of 72km in less than one year. An expansion of 10km was approved in July 2021 to be delivered within 24 months. Kenya commissioned the 480km Nairobi-Mombasa Rail in December 2014 at a cost of $3.2 billion. It was inaugurated in May 2017, two and a half years ahead of schedule despite an expansion costing $1.5 billion added in 2015. Reports on the project were sterling. In CNN Travel’s 2019 list of the ‘20 best things to do in Kenya,’ a ride on the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway was fifth. London’s Daily Telegraph adjudged a ride on the rail line as one of the 13 most attractive railway journeys in the world. It was shortlisted by American engineering magazine, Engineering News-Record, as the world’s best railway project in 2018. This shows Nigeria is simply not serious about developing its infrastructure and economy.

Worse, Buhari is thumping his chest that he has made giant strides in roads and railways. This is pure fiction. He lives in denial of the infrastructure deficit that poses a mammoth threat to life and living in Nigeria. Comically, he says Nigerians in the South-West would have been trekking from Lagos to Ibadan but for the intervention of his regime. The railway project Buhari is boasting about has yet to make a significant impact on transportation in the South-West. The roads that lead to the seaports in Apapa in Lagos are still gridlocked with just 14 months left of his disastrous regime. A report by a presidential committee estimated that Nigeria needed N11 trillion (or more than three-quarters of its 2022 budget of N17.12 trillion) to fix its decayed infrastructure, a figure that the World Bank put at $10 billion annually over 10 years.

Things have got to change, starting with the NASS. The parliament is confused, negligent and does not exercise its oversight functions firmly. It plays politics with infrastructure development at every turn. Illogically, the Senate ignores the provisions of a 2007 law, the FERMA Act (Amendment), which was cited during the debate asking Buhari to declare an emergency on federal roads, due to its own ineptitude. According to that law, a 5.0 per cent user tax on the pump price of petrol, diesel, and international vehicle transit charges, would have given the Federal Road Maintenance Agency N850 billion by now. Instead, senators said the agency had not received more than 20 per cent of this to date. FERMA cannot do much when it is starved of its statutory funds. It is the duty of the parliament to use its legislative power to secure the release of the funds to FERMA, not to whine about its incapacitation.

To its credit, the Buhari regime has devised a tax holiday scheme to reconstruct some of these shabby highways, including a N621 billion scheme being undertaken by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company. This will accommodate 21 federal highways in the six geopolitical zones. This should be deepened, with other companies joining the likes of MTN, the Dangote Group, and Flour Mills of Nigeria in taking advantage of the tax credit to build roads.

Beyond emergency rhetoric, there should be a massive national road rehabilitation and expansion programme with greater private sector participation and involving the 36 states.

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