Ogun Senator advocates partnership model of tackling road infrastructure challenges

Senator representing Ogun East Senatorial District, Ramoni Olalekan Mustapha has advocated for Public Private Partnership model approach to solving Nigeria’s road infrastructure challenges.

The lawmaker who earlier raised a point of order for government’s emergency intervention in fixing roads, bemoaned the pathetic condition of roads across the Federation, saying, the option available to government at the Federal and state level was to engage Private investors.

In an interview in Abuja, the lawmaker argued that government alone cannot cater for road infrastructure, given the paucity of funds with which other sectors of the economy are competing for attention, hence, it was important to bring private investors.

Mustapha said, his view was debated in the Senate and adopted in previous times, but added that Nigerians should first be sensitized on the inherent advantages in concessioning some of the roads before giving them out so that they could cooperate in payment of toll fees.

“We have debated and mentioned times without number that the best way out now is Private Public Partnership (PPP) and if we don’t do that, we are wasting our time.

“If for instance, you are travelling from here to Lokoja which is about 170 kilometers and if the road is not good, it might take six hours to get there. In that six hours that you have to pass through very rough roads, if the road is privatised, with very serious investors to build, maintain and operate, it may not take more than one hour to get there.

‘The difference between one half hour and six and half hours that it take one when the roads are bad is about four hours and it’s only you that can tell the amount of fuel burnt.

“Where you are supposed to use 50 litres of fuel, you might end up using 120 or 130 litres and with the cost of fuel today, you have saved N6,000 when the roads are good compared to N12,000 when the roads are bad.

“So paying N500 toll fee on Public Private Partnership arrangement was better and this is a simple arithmetic which we need to explain to our people through a public enlightenment for understanding as if government is exposing them to hardship by concessioning some of these roads to private investors, rather, government is trying to make life comfortable to them.

“In that way, I think people will embrace it, but if we continue to follow the present concept for the next fifty years, we will not get it right.

According to him, government cannot fund roads in Nigeria, noting that if government was allowed to find roads across the nation, citizens will never experience the comfort of transportation.

He added: “The funding of roads opportunities in government is like an elastic thing and when you draw an elastic, it gets to a point that you can’t draw it again.

“If for example government is rehabilitating 100 roads for now and they have N200 billion to spend on those roads and if the contract of each of the road is N5 billion, and out of the N200 billion, it means each of the road might end up having allocation of N1 billion.

“If the road is 7 to 8 kilometre and you have a total contract value of construction cost of N8 bilion, it means you need 8 years to finish the road. That’s even very modest. There are roads we construct in the value of N20 billion and if you look at the budget, we have only N400 billion and for how many years will it take to construct roads across?”

“Thank God some States are already embracing the PPP arrangement and every State have their own peculiarities.

Mustapha said, torrential rainfall was partly responsible for road disintegration which need government immediate intervention, saying he moved a motion on the floor to enable Senators look into the urgency that Nigeria roads need.

“What I said on the floor of the Senate on the situation of our roads, but if you observed in the last one to two months in the month of August to September, this year, there is no traditional August break that we usually experienced each year.

“From the beginning of August up till this time, it has been raining constantly and so many roads that were bad got worse due to torrential rain.

“So we feel that there is need for government to address this because before there is pain across the country because of our bad road as a result of heavy down pour which has created a worst situation of bad roads.

“I felt that we should call the attention of the executive arm of government because they are the custodian of our funds. It’s for us to make laws and call attention of government to areas they need to intervene because it’s not our responsibility to execute projects, we can only propose projects and that’s exactly what I have done and I hope it wil be taken into consideration.

“The Senate has adopted the resolution and I hope it will be transmitted to the executive arm of government for implementation and on time because what we are asking for is an emergency intervention.”