SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
In the second half of the second term of one Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s leader, the records will show that he was particularly busy building roads.
In words, I mean, or contracts. Among others:
- In January 2021, the government declared that it would complete the reconstruction of the Abuja-Kano Road (AKR) in 2023.
- In July, it awarded a contract worth N309bn to Dangote Industries for the construction of five roads across the country.
- In August, Minister Babatunde Fashola, of Works and Housing, announced that the government was executing 800 contracts and 13,000km of roads and bridges nationwide.
- In October, Fashola bragged to federal legislators about how well the Buhari administration had done on infrastructure, and promised that the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge would be completed in 2022. He said the focus of the 2022 budget was the completion of priority road projects, “especially those on route A1-A9, which lead to the ports and major agricultural hubs attracting vehicles carrying heavy goods in the zones.”
- In December 2021, Clem Agba, the then Minister of State for Finance, Budget and National Planning, declared that the Buhari government completed 500 rural roads that year; I challenged him and Fashola to provide evidence, but they never did.
- On November 3, 2022, the government approved N506bn for the contract of the East-West road project sections 1-4 from Warri to Port Harcourt, Eket, Oron. The council approved another N140bn worth of contracts for the rehabilitation, construction and reconstruction of some other unnamed roads in different parts of the country.
- On January 18, 2023, the government gave NNPC Limited the approval to invest N1.9trn on the reconstruction of 44 federal roads. It was in a programme presidential spokesman Laolu Akande called the reconstruction of selected federal roads under the Federal Government’s Road Infrastructure Development and Refurbishment Investment Tax Credit Policy Phase 2 by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited and its subsidiaries.
- On April 5, 2023, the government approved N36.459bn for the Kaduna Eastern Bypass, and a N327.281bn tax credit scheme for the construction of some roads in Kwara State.
Remember that in November 2022, Fashola also claimed that Buhari had constructed 8,352.94 kilometres of roads and created 339,955 jobs. He declared that his rehabilitation of 12 major roads – spanning 896.187 km — had reduced travel time in Nigeria by 56.20 per cent and added value to the people in the communities the roads pass through.
He bragged, “In these last seven and half years, the administration has been very resolute in the pursuit of progressivism, which is globally recognised as the improvement of the human condition,” adding that “life-defining infrastructure” was “being completed or within the finish line.”
