Category: Transportation

The Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail line takes off today,signalling the return of the good old days of efficient train services, writes ADEYINKA ADERIBIGBE

oday, history will be made as Minister of Transportation,  Rotimi Amaechi opens the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail line.

The project is in fulfilment of the Buhari’s administration’s commitment to bequeath to the nation an efficient, safe, reliable and affordable local train system that would compete with others globally.

Inaugurating the first standard gauge rail line last year, President Muhammadu Buhari spoke of his administration’s commitment to a train system that is “safe, fast and reliable,” pledging that all state capitals would be connected with standard gauge.

It was not an empty boast. It was the corner-piece of the 25-year strategic masterplan of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC). The Lagos-Ibadan train service is part of the bigger component to connect the Port of Lagos to the fringes of Niger border in Kano.

The project was awarded to China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) in 2006 for $8.3 billion. When the government could not secure funds for the project, it decided to build the standard gauge line in segments and rehabilitate the narrow gauge line to meet the transportation needs of Nigerians.

Though only the 187-km long Abuja-Kaduna segment was  delivered last year, it took the government 16 years to do so. Its siting is  strategic because it is the first time Abuja would be connected to the railway network.

The segment, expected to be completed in December 2014, cost $876 million; it consists of $500 million loan from the Exim Bank of China and the balance from the government.

Though construction began in February 2011, and tracklaying  two years later, train operation did not begin until last June, while passenger and freight service took off a month later.

The Lagos-Ibadan segment  was awarded to CCECC for $1.53 billion in 2012.

The government promised to complete this section by 2018.

Other segments to which network was broken and on  which the  government is determined to begin work are: Ibadan-Ilorin (200 km), Ilorin-Minna (270 km), Minna-Abuja and Kaduna-Kano (305 km).

 

Bye, old trains

 

Until last year, Nigeria depended on the British-built narrow cape gauge rail system, which has a lower design capacity.

From 11 million passenger traffic in 1964, passenger traffic fell to 1.6 million in 2003, while freight traffic fell from three million tons in 1964 to about 100,000 tons by 2000.

On assuming office in 2015, Amaechi promised to rewrite the railway transportation history.

Blaming the aging rolling stock for the drop in the fortunes of the railway, Amaechi said the government would not be satisfied with a train service that goes on an average of 45 km/h, and takes 31 hours to traverse Lagos to Kano.

Insisting that the government was committed to delivering on a fast-moving and comfortable rail transportation system, Amaechi said having succeeded in the rehabilitation of narrow gauge, attention must be paid to the standard gauge, moreso as economic growth and the urgent needed to decentralise, redistribute traffic and bring relief to the  over-burdened roads made a standard gauge line desirable.

Being the oldest corporation, NRC, perhaps, has the largest collection of antiquated rolling stocks that have continued its grinding movements on the narrow gauge built by the British colonial government in 1900.

With its golden era long gone, NRC ran into troubled waters in the twilights of the 20th century, until the turn of the new millennium, when renewed concerted efforts began to bring back the old era and put the railway back on track.

The railway had remained largely on track due to the ingenuity of local engineers and other members of the workforce who have been improvising and fabricating essential component parts of the locomotive and coaches in order to ensure that the train moves, no matter how sluggish.

From its high point when it has about 250 coaches and 55 locomotives, NRC could hardly boast of 10 functioning locomotives named after iconic national figures, while aggressive efforts were on to ensure that more coaches were rehabilitated and added to the rolling stock.

A former NRC managing director who would not want his name mentioned, at a forum, described the trains movement as a miracle. Praising the engineers for this, he said while the government shoped for funds to buy modern rolling stocks, the NRC management was committed to rehabilitating its aging stock to keep the corporation on profitability path.

A passenger on the Lagos-Kano train service Kareem Abubakar noted that the railway would witness an explosion in patronage, especially on the strategic and hugely successful route, if the government was able to deliver on its standard gauge promise.

Experience, he said, had shown that even the thrice weekly frequency of train service on the route was grossly inadequate, and that those who ply the roads would switch over to patronise the railway for its safety, affordability and reliability.

An Offa-based textile trader who uses the shuttle service for his Lagos-Kano trips Alhaja Kadhijat Alebiosu said the standard gauge would boost passenger and freight traffic along the Lagos-Kano-Lagos route. Alhaja Alebiosu said despite the slow pace of the train, she still loved to patronise the railway for its safety, compared to other means of land transportation.

The NRC said the introduction of standard gauge would rejuvenate the economy.

Its Managing Director, Fidet Ohkiria, said the movement of goods and persons on modern standard gauge lines would boost the economy.

“To make Nigeria investment- friendly, and catch up with the rest of the world, the restrictions on the NRC must be removed and our rolling stocks modernised.

“For the economy to be truly competitive, Nigeria must move away from the narrow gauge to standard gauge lanes,” Okhiria said.

 

Track Record

 

CCECC, appointed since 2012 to deliver the Lagos-Ibadan route as well as three other sections on the Lagos-Kano standard gauge lane, was established in June 1979 and has over the years evolved into a global corporation that not only handles railway engineering but also all civil engineering projects with enviable track record.

Among its other projects, according to Wikipedia, are the 8.6 km double track standard gauge Carmel Tunnels in Haifa, Israel, built in 2009, the 4.6-km Gilon tunnel in Northern Israel in 2014 and the construction of the underground stations of the Tel Aviv light rail constructed in 2014, among other projects, scattered all over the world.

 

Benefits

 

A logistics entrepreneur Mr Edeme Kelikume, said Nigeria has the right kind of population to make standard gauge a “hugely successful” venture.

Kelikume, a railway logistics expert and Chief Executive of Connect Rail Services Limited (CRSL), said: “The standard gauge is the way to go, whether for passenger or freight services, adding that the astronomic cost of living in Nigeria and other associated costs would be addressed, once people can move more cheaply and agro-allied and solid minerals can move faster and more freely from the points of production across the country, to the various markets, including international or export market.”

According to him, picking world-class contractors to handle the project would ensure that the best is delivered to Nigerians soonest.

A regular train service passenger said a standard gauge that would connect Lagos with Ibadan, open the area to new vista of life, adding that it would reduce  traffic on the nation’s busiest expressway.

Apart from promoting a cleaner environment through a reduction in carbon emission by reducing the vehicles on the road, he said the link would promote greater integration, open up the hinterlands, and ensure faster, safer and cheaper means of transportation, thereby removing the dominance of private commuter bus operators on the route.

Politically, he argued that linking Lagos, the nation’s commercial capital with Southwest’s political capital, would have tremendous impact on the Southwest, the same way that Abuja was connected to Kaduna, the political capital of the core North by the speed train last year.

 

Conclusion

 

With an economy in its way out of recession and naira battling to regain its strength, it is debatable whether the government would keep next year’s timeline to deliver on the project.

Ameachi’s body  language is that he would not condone further delays, but only time will tell how far he can go.

Despite the fortune spent on roads over the years, they appear to have been left in poorer condition by successive administrations. This may soon be a thing of the past, with the government’s plan to introduce a road fund, writes ADEYINKA ADERIBIGBE.

he executive and the legislature are working in tandem to address the road challenge. They are on the same page in removing the bottleneck for safe and motorable roads.

Before  the National Assembly is a Bill that seeks to establish a Road Fund. The objective is to develop, rehabilitate, reconstruct, maintain and fund the roads, as well as establish a dedicated purse where revenues needed to maintain the roads, irrespective of their classification, would come from.

The broader objective is to drive sanity through the gamut of the sector by creating a National Road Board.

For 46 years, the nation has battled with establishing a Federal Roads Authority that would take after its sister-nation, Ghana, which, in 1974, established a Ghana Highways Authority.

However, while Ghana was able to achieve the feat three years after Nigeria started the search in 1971, the latter had continued to shop for a befitting road map to galvanise its policies on the sector.

Other laws waiting to be incorporated into the new Bill are the Federal Highways Act 1971, the Federal Road Safety Commission Act of 1988 and the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency Act of 2000.

Though the opportunities were lost in the 70s and 80s, attempts by the late Majors-General Mamman Kontagora and Abdulkareem Adisa to midwife the Federal Roads Authority (FRA) were not sustained.

Shorn of the legal instrument, deepening the user’s contribution to road maintenance commenced in January 2004 when the government dismantled toll gates on federal roads as introduced the fuel tax regime.

The most recent attempt at coming up with a Federal Roads Authority and attendant fund was the National Workshop on Roads Sector Reforms, organised on June 10, 2008, by the Federal Ministry of Transportation, under Mrs. Diezani Allison-Maduekwe, a former minister of that ministry.

Although the workshop set May 2009 as deadline for the passage of the Federal Roads Authority, the Road Fund Bills and the inauguration of the Road Fund Board, it was unrealistic. It was only in 2010, that the Federal Executive Council approved the resolution and sent an executive bill to the National Assembly.

 

Implications

 

While the government hesitated, the entire road network grew worse as maintenance became near impossible due to inadequate allocation.

The result was that virtually all the three tiers of roads-Trunk A (Federal roads), Trunk B (state roads), and Trunk C (local government roads) became death traps, causing avoidable accidents, deaths and property loss.

Experts said the transportation sector recorded less than five per cent contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because the roads remained the poorest and most-unsafe in the world.

Bemoaning the debt profile of the sector, put at above N2 trillion, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, recently proposed the establishment of an Infrastructure Bond to create new money to finance its losses.

He said:”I think we should float an infrastructure bond that will capture road infrastructure.”

For Dogara, the burden of the long years of inaction on the roads is heavy. For every N1 the government fails to spend on road infrastructure, the country loses N5. The loss in man-hour per annum is put at 10 billion hours or N1.0 trillion. These are aside the cost of impairment, trauma, and deaths, resulting from road crashes.

Creating new avenues for the funding of the massive rehabilitation of old networks and the construction of new ones has become inevitable.

Early last year, Fashola hinted at the possibility of returning to the toll regime.

The Nigerian Society of Highway Engineers (NSHE) said funding, which the tolling seeks to address, was only a fraction of the issues contending with sanity and good roads in the sector.

Needed, according to the HSHE, are a comprehensive road reform package and the delivery of enabling instruments to give the reforms legal backing by the federal law makers.

Without the agency, the nation, they argued, would lose millions that could have accrued to the National Road Fund.

The National Roads Fund shall, among others, hold, purchase, acquire and dispose of any property for the purpose of carrying out its functions.

The Bill further provides that up to three per cent of the total monies accruing to the Fund be used for the management and administration of the Fund. In effect, the cost of running the Fund and other ancillary will be paid for from its accruals.

 

Sources of funds

 

According to the fourth clause of the Road Fund Bill, the sources of accruals to the Fund include five per cent of road users’ charge on pump price of petrol and diesel received from petroleum products marketers as required to meet the routine and periodic road maintenance needs, grants and loans to the Road Fund by the Federal, 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, as well as all the 774 local governments, statutory corporations, any international organisation, private foundations or persons, gifts of land and money.

The user charge of five per cent on pump price of petrol and diesel could be per buyer. This goes to the marketer for further remittance to the Fund.

With the cost of fixing the roads put at N3 trillion by the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN), compared to the Ministry of Works’ allocated N520 billion this year, the ministry would obviously need to think out of the box.

COREN President Mr Kasim Ali said a new way of funding was needed because the old format was obsolete. He supported the repeal of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency Act 2002, Federal Roads Authority Bill 2016 and the National Roads Funds Establishment Bill.

Jacob Akindele, a Special Adviser (Road Administration) to a former  Governor of Ogun State, from 2003-2011), said a Federal Roads Authority remained the best legacy any minister could bequeath to the nation.

Akindele, a visiting member of the Guardian Editorial Board, in a two-part seminal paper, blamed inappropriate institutional and legal frameworks, unpredictable and inadequate funding and a dire lack of maintenance culture for the poor state of roads.

Chairman, Road Transportation Committee of the Nigerian Academy of Engineers (NAE), Dr Tajudeen Bawa-Allah, urged the National Assembly to revisit all recommendations since 1971, aimed at repositioning the transportation and road sectors.

He expressed fears that the proposed law may lack the requisite bite because the foundation – the National Transportation Policy – has been neglected.

Bawa-Allah  said a national policy by the Federal Government would contain the holistic nature of the roads as well as the fund to for their regular maintenance.

Indicating that these were part of the recommendations of the Road Vision 2000 Committee of which he was a member, Bawa-Allah urged the Federal Ministry of Works to come up with a map of road networks in the country, indicating via colours which roads are for total rehabilitation, which ones for palliative touching and new ones to be built.

“Let the Ministry periodically publish this in major newspapers- maybe thrice a year (January, June and December), to enable Nigerians be abreast of the pace of the government in road rehabilitation projects across the country.

“Government in coming up with fresh demands to fund our road, needs must also  show us periodically how they are spending our money. They should come up with colourised map of all road networks in Nigeria and periodically update Nigerians where they are working every quarter,” Bawa-Allah said.

Throwing his weight behind the Road Fund and other laws cooking at the National Assembly, Dr Joseph Olawale Shojobi said the new Bill if assented to would bring sanity to the road sector. He said a situation where all tiers of government (Federal, states and local governments) amounting to 812 different authorities supervise  roads, had made the sector ungovernable, and one of the most disorganised in the world.

 

Conclusion

 

“The Nigeria Roads Board will aggregate all roads and abolish the trunking system as a new mode of classification would hold sway across the country.

“The Board will have branches in all the states and these would look over the roads in their domain and a new classification of most important to less important would be introduced. This new classification will also influence the mode of allocation of funds for their maintenance,” Shojobi said.

The regulation of the sector, and the formulation of various policies to drive it, he said, will also improve access to funding. He listed other access outside budgetary allocation from the three tiers to include tolls, fuel tax, levies and charges from vehicle-related activities such as insurance, vehicle and driver licence, mandatory Ministry of Transportation vehicle testing.

He said his findings showed that “contrary to the Federal Government’s assumptions, the tolls collected from toll gates between 2001 and 2002 were so huge that it could have gone a long way in maintaining roads across the country. He added that the fuel tax introduced by the government failed abysmally, noting that if the tax was depoliticised, Nigerians might have been able to see the impact of the new agency in more profound ways as there would have been more than enough over the years to handle the growing needs of national assets.

“There is the absolute need to set up the National Road Board and merge all other agencies in charge of road into it. The Board should be domiciled in the Ministry of Transportation, and work as a quasi-independent agency. They should have a dedicated funding stream, mostly coming from taxes on Premium Motor Spirit (Petrol) and tolls on federal or other dedicated roads. This money should be the sole means of operating the agency, maintaining the road and building more roads or bridges.

“This has to happen in the same content as we build up our rail system. Rail system is much needed in a country like Nigeria to move people, goods, and provide an alternative to road usage.

“The dedicated funds can be expanded and its coverage increased as there emerges new opportunities, so there will always be new monies created to absorb the ever growing needs of the state of our roads,” Shojobi added.

Shojobi, an engineer and road consultant, said the Federal Roads Safety Corps (FRSC) should be collapsed and function as a department under the National Road Board to harmonise road transportation and vehicular activities across the country.

“FRSC should be national in outlook and should engage more in enlightenment, road use education and intelligent transportation surveillance in order to make our roads truly safe,” he said.

Kia Motors’ all-new 2018 Stinger fastback sedan has been honoured with an EyesOn Design award for Production Car Design Excellence at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit. At an event dominated by introductions from American auto companies, Kia’s stinger stole the spotlight.
“We’ve made a lot of great cars and I’m proud of all of them, but the Stinger is something special,” said Peter Schreyer, Kia Motors’ chief design officer.
The EyesOn Design awards honour the best production and concept vehicles making their worldwide auto show debut at the NAIAS. This year’s categories include concept car; production car; concept truck; production truck; innovative use of colour, graphics and materials; interior design; user experience award and designer catalyst.
Brimming with power, passion and performance, the Stinger is a sport sedan dedicated to the thrill of driving while cosseting occupants in luxury. From its sleek front clip through its svelte flanks, and up to its powerful haunches, the Stinger exudes a muscular confidence. The Stinger’s stance and visual balance are designed to lend the car an air of elegance and athleticism, rather than boy-racer aggression. Inside is a purposeful cabin that is luxurious and exquisitely crafted. A strong horizontal plane across the dash presents the driver with a thick, leather-wrapped steering wheel. Front and centre of the driver is a single instrument binnacle with a combination of analogue and digital instrumentation.
It will go on sale later in the year.

Research has shown that a lot of road traffic crashes were caused by improper following distance (tailgating) and lane indiscipline.
On a bright day (good weather), the two-second rule should be applied as the following distance between one vehicle and the other. However, on a raining day (bad weather), the four-second rule should be applied.
The distance between you and the vehicle ahead of you should depend on the following factors:
•The weather: The the more unclear the weather, the more the following distance allowed.
•The volume or flow of traffic: If the traffic is heavy (go slow), the following distance can be narrowed but to a safe level.
•Speed: The more your speed, the more should be the following distance considering the braking and stopping distance factors. This rule also applies to convoy drivers but the intrusion avoidance technique should be cautiously employed in the process.
•Visual perception: The poorer your visual acuity, the more should be the following distance.
•Age: The older you are in age, the less your visual perception and reaction time and the more should be your following distance.
•Security mission convoy: The following distance depends on the nature of the mission and the traffic environment.
•Road surface: The more slippery the road surface, the more the following distance to be allowed.
Most multiple accidents were caused by improper following distance. Tailgating is also responsible for several solo accidents in a bid to avoid rear end collusion. It is sad to know that over 70 percent of the drivers in Nigeria, including drivers of own vehicles, are guilty of improper following distance (tailgating).
Lane indiscipline is the twin problem of must drivers in Nigeria. Drivers are expected to drive in the middle of their lanes without moving too close to the vehicle or lane on the right or left (correct lateral spacing).
Whether the lanes are marked (with white lines) or not, every good driver most know and keep to his or her lane at all times through frontal and peripheral visual perception. When changing lane, keep to the new lane as well. It is wrong to move too close or infringe on another driver’s lane (unless when changing lane). Any change of lane or movement which prompts other driver to brake or shifts suddenly for you is wrong and must be avoided for the sake of safety.
Lane weaving is another allied dangerous habit of some drivers due to impatience. This is a case where drivers move in and out of lanes too frequently (incessant and hasty change of lanes). This dangerous act confuses other drivers, riders or pedestrians and oftentimes, cause them to apply brake abruptly to prevent a collision with the lane weaving driver. This practice has caused several collisions and fatalities.
In a nutshell, drivers must be safety-conscious and avoid tailgating, lane indiscipline and lane weaving to further reduce the rate of road traffic crashes in the country.