The Executive Secretary, National Association of Road Transport Owners (NARTO), Comrade Aloga Ogbogo has said that the Federal Government does not have the capacity to reconstruct the nation’s roads.
Ogbogo who disclosed this in an interview with newsmen in Lagos argued that the budgets of this country if put together to fix the nation’s roads, would not be able to fix them.
“I am aware that close to N423 billion was set aside for the Ministry of Woks this year and then the Ministry of Transport has also its own half but the Ministry of Transport concentrated more on railways and the Aviation. But the Ministry of Transport has a good chunk but again, it has outstanding debts. So, by the time it pays its outstanding debts, what is left for you to work with?
“And I for one know that I have postulated three theories before now, what will take us out of this road sham and one of my theories was that we should set up a National Road Fund. We look at the petroleum industry and see how we can tinker around with the palliatives and remove something from there because it is accumulating premium and hand it over to the private sector to manage so that we don’t need to tie ourselves. And even if the road maintenance is tired to the budget, I am aware that the paper works of the budget was done in December last year and they are just assenting to it now and the rain is around the corner and you can never have good roads constructed around the rainy season.
“Number two is to concession out the roads and make sure that you have a good framework. Then number three is tolling. Look at Jebba-Mokwa road now, the road has been washed off and the bridge has collapsed. So, this is my take on that and until we are able to address this issues, I do not see us having good roads in this country”, he said.
On why Nigerians rejected the National Road Fund as proposed by the National Assembly recently, he added,” Nigerians rejected it because they were looking at it that it will amount to an increase to the pump price of the petroleum products and that was why if you get my choice of word, I said how they could tinker around the template, the buildup that resulted to the ultimate price Nigerians are now paying for petroleum products. We have the storage margin, we have the NPA margin, we have the transporters’ margin, we have the landing fee and there are other margins that were all imputed into the template”.
On the port access roads, the Executive Secretary while regretting that nothing significant seemed to have happened since after the last withdrawal of service by some associations and stakeholders however said that the next time the associations would call for such action, it would be total and the same people would come and say the same thing they had said earlier.
“You know the present state of these roads had been a recurring decimal since the last four or five years. Is it happening for the first time? Government was supposed to put a permanent maintenance structure to address the issue knowing full well that if the rain is around the corner, we will have the same state”, he concluded.
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