The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has disclosed that the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari inherited road contractual liabilities worth N1.5trillion from previous administrations.
Fashola in a statement by his Special Adviser on Communications, Hakeem Bello, said the ministry inherited 206 roads that were not budgeted for or poorly funded, adding that it had now designed a blueprint consisting of identifying and prioritising heavy traffic bearing roads for conveying essential goods and services across the country.
In a statement, he said, “We have to build roads that evacuate our sea and airports; roads that drive our energy for now; roads that go to the tank farms to evacuate fuel from the South to the North and roads that sustain us and bring in our feed stock, cattle, vegetables and livestock from the North down to the South.
“And that is why you see us building from Lagos to Ibadan, to Ilorin, to Jebba to link all the way to Kaduna and Kano and go on up North. And we are doing the same thing trying to connect River Benue through the Loko-Oweto Bridge and the Second Niger Bridge; Kano-Kaduna and Kano-Maiduguri. Those are the choices we have made because this is a period of hard choices, trying to do more with less.”
Fashola added, “Those are the choices that we have made; they are not esoteric choices, they are simple and rational choices. All the roads we are working on had been awarded before I got into office by the previous administration – over 206 roads.
The minister also said Nigeria lost more than 3,000 megawatts of electricity to the activities of vandals in the last six months.
