PHOTO: ISAAC JIMOH AYODELE
Tag: highway
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Photo: Aircraft on highway
Scrap of an aircraft on the service lane along Oshodi-Anthony expressway.
PHOTO: ISAAC JIMOH AYODELE -
Highway safety: FRSC targets secondary schools’ pupils
To inculcate road safety in youths, the Federal Road Safety Corps in Lagos State has taken the campaign to secondary schools’ pupils.
As part of the campaign, it organised a quiz competition for selected 20 schools to commemorate the 2016 children’s Day.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the competition was organised separately by the Lekki and Yaba Units of the corps to inculcate the Highway Code in the students.
Mr Azuibike Onyemeh, Unit Commander of Lekki told NAN that the campaign was to prepare the children to start thinking of the challenges of being future leaders in various aspects of life.
“The objective is to inculcate in them and put into practicel road safety education and the culture of road safety in children because they are the future leaders.
“This is the reason for the road safety related quiz competition in which five schools are competing.
“If their parents are driving on a high speed or making calls while driving, the children will be able to correct them since they have learnt the necessary precautions,” he said.
In her remarks, Mrs Nimota Okoro, the officer of Yaba Unit of FRSC, observed that most parents or drivers pay little or no attention to the safety of children, especially while driving.
“Evidence from patrol and enforcement activities show that several children are not protected with seatbelt while sitting in a vehicle and there are a lot of underage drivers.
“This act of negligence exposes them to great danger especially in the event of road crashes.
“Often you see mothers carrying their babies on their laps or children standing while on the wheels; or parents sending their underage children on errand with their cars.
“This is wrong and it must stop,’’ he added.
She, therefore, urged all stakeholders to take necessary steps to ensure the safety of children in their environment.
Mrs Owoupele Diseph, a parent, commended the FRSC for the initiative and urged other parents to ensure that the safety of their children was accorded priority attention.
Another parent and teacher, Mrs Tinuke Ogunleye, said the programme was educative, especially the rules and driving code..
“Parents need to expose their children to such knowledge because it teaches the children the hazards of disobeying the road safety rules.”
Miss Ijeoma Ubah, a student of Ayomi School in Lekki, said the event had enlightened her on road signs and driving code.
“Before now I did not know much about the various road signs and code but preparing for the quiz competition made me to know more,’’ she told NAN.
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Travellers stranded on damaged Benin-Warri highway
Thousands of travellers using the Benin-Warri expressway to the East were at the weekend stranded on the damaged portions.
Many of them spent the night on the road.
A gridlock resulting from the failed parts made driving a nightmare.
Our reporter, who visited the collapsed sections near Adagbarassa Junction and Oviri, yesterday, met several stranded travellers.
“We have been here for over six hours and we cannot proceed further because as you can see, the road is blocked,” a truck driver from Kebbi State, Dirisu said.
The strategic Benin-Warri axis of the East-West highway is the preferred route for those travelling from Lagos and other western states to Port Harcourt (Rivers), Calabar (Cross River), Uyo (Akwa Ibom) and other major cities and towns in the Southsouth and Southeast.
From a few potholes sometime ago, the bad spots have turned into gullies.
In a special report in its Niger Delta Report section, The Nation raised the alarm on the deplorable state of the road.
The report warned that unless the road was repaired, it would cause a nightmare to motorists during the rainy season.
But barely a few weeks into the rainy season, the road has turned a major headache for travellers and transporters. They have been spending hours on the damaged portions, about four kilometres long.
“The worst part of this problem is that this part of the road has no alternative. The only way around it is to go through Effurun/Eku/Amukpe. That, apart from taking longer hours, is also in a deplorable state and risky because of armed robbers,” a driver said.
The dilapidated road has led to an increase in fares by as much as 100 per cent.
For instance, a 20-minute journey from Warri to Sapele, which hitherto cost about N250, is now N550.
Also, the one-hour trip from Benin to Warri, which cost between N500 and N650, rose to N1,200.
“My brother, that is where we found ourselves. Worse still, there is nothing we can do about it. We are not in the government. We have to meet the costs and save something to cater for the family at home,” said Ejiro, a driver who conveyed our reporter from Effurun Roundabout to Oviri.
Investigation by our reporter showed that the gridlock was worsened by a lack of officials of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) to control the traffic.
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Highway Engineers, AG-Dangote partner on concrete road
• AG Dangote completes 23km concrete road
The Executive team of the Nigerian Institution of Highway Engineers has lauded the Management of AG Dangote for the use of cement to construct 23 kilometers road from Itori to Ibeshe in Ogun State, offering to partner with the company to better enhance its operations.
Commenting on the use of concrete road for the country, the chairman of the institution who led the delegation for the industrial visits, Eng. Isa Usman Emoabino, said: “Definitely, this will not be a new thing for Nigeria. AG Dangote is veering out into another area that is not very common in Nigeria and if they work together with professionals like us, we will make sure that we are able to get the best out of that. That is our main reason for coming here today; we tagged our visit here today to be industrial visits, and all through the things we have seen, we try to give free consultancy, in order to ensure that whatever we have seen can be made better.”
The Chief Executive of AG-Dangote, Ashif Juma thanked the professional engineers for coming and importantly for offering to partner with the company.
He said the 23 kilometers concrete road is a corporate social responsibility efforts of the company, to show that concrete roads are better in all ramifications than the asphalt roads.
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Bank presents highway kits to Ikpeazu
Sterling Bank Plc at the weekend presented reflective kits for street sweepers and highway managers to Abia State Governor Okezie Ikpeazu.
The bank, through its “Sterling Environmental Makeover” (#STEM) series, cleaned major markets, highways, streets and motor parks in different states.
A statement said the effort focuses on environmental sustainability and aims to promote clean environment and good health among Nigerians. Waste management authorities of the states were partnered for the exercise.
The cleaning held simultaneously in Lagos, Aba, Abuja, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Owerri, Osogbo, Port Harcourt and Uyo.
The statement said the exercise, which was initiated in 2013 in furtherance of its core purpose of enriching lives, adding that the bank will continually engage in initiatives that promote a healthy environment, especially those that align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
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Hell’s own highway
If you suffered the harrowing experience of a 40 minutes drive that turned into nearly seven hours of sheer nightmare, it seems highly unlikely that you’ll be taken in by the extravagant photo-op session staged by Governor Ibikunle Amosun at the Warewa end of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway in the wee hours of Wednesday last week. Yes, I can report that the journey which began around 9 pm – somewhere in Mushin and which at the very worst would take an hour and half to make, ended at 3.15 am the next day! And the reason? Canyon-sized craters that have taken residence at the Warewa end of the long bridge on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway!
To the hordes of motorists – including yours truly – pinned down by the forces that spoke more to our pervasive institutional failure (certainly not some acts of nature or citizens’ famed indiscipline), puzzling would be an understatement to describe the ‘sympathy visit’ by the governor and a team which included his wife to that failed portion of the highway at the ungodly hour as widely reported.
So much for the well-publicised visit, I can testify that the giant craters said to be the chief cause of the problem have not disappeared, nearly a week after. As for the heavy equipment deployed, they may have remained visible at the site, they are actively on the ‘sleep mode’ right up till the time of writing this as many a passers-by will readily testify. Yes, a giant, on-site billboard proclaims the ‘mercy intervention’ by the Ogun State Ministry of Works and Infrastructure, but then, there is really nothing to show for any activity. And to imagine that the entire paraphernalia of administration in Ogun State had only last week relocated to that very spot supposedly to ‘facilitate’ a routine task that a more public service-minded councillor in charge of works in Obafemi-Owode Local Government would have undertaken without the accompanying fuss!
By the way – if it came to any real relief, the very next day after the highly publicized visit, it took yours truly more three hours to cover the same barely five kilometres stretch of the long bridge stretching from Berger to the journalists’ estate at Arepo! This time, the problem was a minor accident involving two trailers. With little space left for other motorists to manoeuvre, it soon became a familiar return to bedlam – no thanks to the legendary impotence of the men of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) – who could only ‘stand and stare’ in the absence of tools to work with! This time however, I was relatively luckier to have made it home in one piece at 1.30 am the next day! I know a lady who was stabbed in the arm after her handbag was seized by hoodlums who feigned to be helpers when her car broke down!
The story of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway obviously mirrors the dysfunctions at the heart of the nation’s crisis of development. It explains why the job meant for everybody never gets done by anybody. That was the moral behind the suggestion last week by Governor Amosun that the state government was moved out of pity than duty to act! Of course, the governor is right!
It explains why the country would expend billions on projects without as much as a thought to keeping it running. In the days of yore, we had the Public Works Department with their ubiquitous gangs that fixed manholes before they develop into killer-craters. I recall the road camps where those men congregated before the day’s job only to converge after a hard day’s job. Today, what do we have? An Abuja headquartered Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) that rather than fix roads –would rather be found recruiting militias for politicians to rig elections – an agency that has lost its rationale!
No less can be said of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) – that ubiquitous agency that has become a nuisance on the road than anything else. Today, not only is the FRSC ineffective as a road safety agency in any true sense, it is operationally incapacitated to undertake the most routine of safety maintenance on the highways. For lack of the basic equipment in search and rescue, our own one-time elite paramilitary commission now finds itself veering into non-operational issues ranging from checking vehicle particulars to drivers’ licensing to manufacture of licence plates – occasionally spending time on the chaotic highways to while away time!
Are we not in trouble? At this time, the question that should bother everyone –is why a country so vast and so endowed and which aspires to move men into space cannot even begin the elementary task of taking care of little things? Everywhere you go across the federation, the story of our roads is the same. It is the story of neglect and abandonment. The other day, it was Senator Barnabas Gemade and his committee lamenting the state of the roads in the South-east. Yours truly on a visit to Jos, the Plateau State capital last week could not imagine the state of the road from the airport to town! At a point, I thought I was in Mogadishu or some far-flung country in a state of war! It was, to put it mildly, terrible. The same adjectives, I guess, would describe the Jos-Abuja highway! I once wrote about the death corridor called Ilorin- Kabba highway where bands of Fulani marauders operate at will simply because the roads have become impassable.
What we have at the moment is a national emergency. The challenge is as simple as finding a sustainable framework for road maintenance. Without that, all our efforts to transform the economy would come to naught. That is why other nations take road maintenance seriously! This is one thing that the Buhari administration would need to take seriously. And if I may suggest, there is no use pretending that the current framework which has failed would ever work. New thinking is what is required.
As a final point, what would it take FERMA to work effectively? Is it that the nation is lacking in manpower? What special skills are needed to fix a broken road? Or is it that the nation does not have sufficient bitumen to fix the roads? Isn’t bitumen one of the derivatives of oil? Or funds? What about the billions annually voted for that? Does anyone know? And does anyone care?
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N600b Calabar-Katsina-Ala highway’ll boost economy
•President inaugurates 260-kilometre inter-state road
President Muhammadu Buhari was yesterday at Obung Village, Netim Clam in Akampa Local Government Area of Cross River State to perform the ground-breaking for the construction of a 260-kilometre Super Highway to link Calabar, the Cross River State capital with the northern part of the country.
The President expressed the Federal Government’s commitment to the speedy completion of the dual carriage highway within the scheduled five years.
Besides exposing Cross River State to socio-economic opportunities, the project, when completed, will also attract patronage from Central Africa to the seaport in the Southsouth state.
Buhari said: “When completed, this road, which starts from the seaport and terminates at the boundary between Cross River and Benue states will link the southern part of Nigeria to the Northcentral, the Northeast and ultimately, Central Africa.
“This will, undoubtedly, expand the boundaries of our economy by providing countries such as Niger Republic and Chad access to the seaport.”
He commended Governor Ben Ayade and his team for creating a new vista of business opportunities for the state and the country.
Ayade’s colleagues from Imo and Akwa Ibom states , governors Rochas Okorocha and Udom Emanuel witnessed the ceremony.
The super highway, which is an evacuation corridor from a deep seaport in Bakassi, is expected to shorten travel time between Calabar and Katsina-Ala from about six hours to one hour thirty minutes. Both projects – super highway and the sea port – are estimated to cost about N700 billion.
Ayade listed the road’s special features to include: internet connectivity throughout the highway; a photographic solar system with a satellite antenna; and speed cameras.
He said: “It is probably the first road to have anti-slip features on the highway, it is a digital road designed for the 21st century. This road is a 260km super highway; it’s an evacuation corridor from the seaport. It will have a track of 14 metres and a key wall of 680 metres that would allow for vessels from outside and every other vessel to berth. It will therefore provide an evacuation corridor for vessels, material and equipment lying in Calabar uniformly, effortlessly to Northern Nigeria.”
With a take-off grant of 500 million Euros, the project will be financed by partners under a public-private-partnership (PPP) arrangement, the governor said.
According to him, the project was borne out of a need to reduce dependence on federal allocation, consequent upon the loss of the state’s oil wells to neighbouring Akwa Ibom State and the ceding of the mineral-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon.
He said: “The state was reduced to wants in body and spirit. It became imperative that we need to construct a new means of production, we needed to open the horizon to get more young people employed.”
Ayade urged his colleagues from Benue and Nasarawa states to key into the project and ensure that the roads spread over from Katsina-Ala. He commended the President for shelving politics and putting national interest first in deciding to perform such a function in a state not controlled by the ruling the All Progressives Congress (APC).
“Given the circumstances of our nation and politics, Cross River State would not have been worthy of your first port of call. You have shown that you are truly the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he said.
The President, he noted, gave his support for the project from inception to ensure that the dream of the state becomes a reality.
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Lawyer hails Ayade on highway
A lawyer and arbitrator, Dr. Dorn Cklaimz Enamhe has praised Cross River State governor, Prof. Ben Ayade on the commissioning of the Calabar super highway by President Muhammadu Buhari.
He said the road when completed would help boost development.
“Since he assumed office in the state, he has worked tirelessly to improve the living condition of our people and make the state a pride of all its citizens The superhighway will reduce, significantly, the number of deaths that have become a regular occurrence on that highway. It will also create new towns, cities and also improve on the economy of indegenes. It will nevertheless reduce youth restiveness because young men will be enganged in productive ventures, knowing that they can now export their farm yields through the access road,” he said.
According to him, Professionals such as engineers, surveyors environmentalists or architects will find jobs. “There will also be jobs for casual workers, farmers and women, who will sell foodstuff to workers,” he added.
Other artisans such as mechanics, vulcanizers, restaurant operators, Ena,he said, will be engaged
“Crime will reduce because security will not be too difficult and there will definitely be serious security patrols to guarantee the safety of lives and property on the road,” the lawyer said.
According to him, the road will ease movements and enable new market to open.
“People can then live in Ogoja and come to work in Calabar and avoid paying heavy rents, thereby decongesting the state capital. Many people will have alternative roads to choose from whenever there is need for it,” he said.
On how the people feel about the President’s visit, Enamhe said: “Cross River State has not been lucky with Presidential visits. This is more apparent and noteworthy when viewed from the perspective of an All Progressives Congress (APC) president that is yet to go to many APC states. So, embarking on this visit to a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) controlled state goes to show the seriousness of the governor, the importance he attaches to the programme and his gift of national networking.”
He continued: “Taking cognisance of the President’s love for change, he must have been highly impressed by the Governor, who himself had used the road and had promised to do something about it in 1996 when he as the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) chairman and Senator Banabas Gemade as Secretary of Works were conferred with Doctoral Degrees by University of Calabar. The determination and humility of not giving up must have endeared Mr. President to Gov Ayade to take the groundbreaking programme very seriously.”
On the governor’s achievements since May 29, Enamhe said: “He has been able to consolidate on the already existing peaceful enviroment and made citizens and investors to have more confidence in the state. He has been able to clear all outstanding salaries that he met. He ensures that workers get their salaries on the 25th of each month. He has been able to bring back confidence in the workers so much so that his negotiating skills helped in resolving the judicial workers’ strike that had been lingering for a very long time and only recently resolved the issue of local government workers and pensioners.
According to Enamhe, Prof Ayade has been able to show courage and humility in convincing Mr. President to accept to come back and perform the groudbreaking after the initial cancellation and the political and technical issues raised in the botched visit.
“His personal attitude to work has changed the way and manner civil servants now show seriousness to work by resuming early. There is no more loitering about. They now stay till the official close of work. His appointments has clearly shown his sensitivity to gender balance,” the lawyer said.
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RRS, KAI arrest 109 for highway crossing
The Lagos State Police Command, in collaboration with the state-owned sanitation outfit – Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI) brigade – arrested 109 people for crossing the highway at the weekend.
Rapid Response Squad (RRS) Commander Tunji Disu, said the operation was carried out to ensure the use of the pedestrian bridges by residents.
According to him, the enforcement will prevent loss of lives on highways and enhance traffic free-flow.
Of the 109, Disu said 102 are men and seven women.
According to Disu, the offenders were arrested for crossing the expressway at Ketu Bus-Stop along Lagos-Ikorodu Road on Friday and Saturday.
He said: “The special operation was necessitated following increasing loss of lives on the highways.
“This operation is a continuous one. We are saddled with the responsibility to instil discipline to preserve lives and property. This is why we can’t fold our arms while many lives are being lost for not using the pedestrian bridges. Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has said he wants a safer Lagos.
“This act of indiscipline will not be allowed in the state any longer. If traffic is allowed to flow freely, the menace of in-traffic robbery cases will become a thing of the past,” he said.
One of the motorists plying the route, Mrs Remi Fagboungbo, lauded the development.
She urged the operatives not to relent in making sure people‘s attitude to the use of pedestrian bridge change.
“The overhead bridge is built to protect our lives. I wonder why people refuse to climb it. In recent time, a commercial bus driver knocked down a young man on this highway when he wanted to cross. This exercise must continue because it will help a lot in reducing deaths on the highway and allow free-flow of traffic”, she said.
Another commuter, Mr Alonge Ajasa, thanked the governor for acting on time to curb the act of indiscipline.
“This is indeed the change we all need at this moment. This exercise will in turn be beneficial to the citizenry if it continues this way. Our governor has really done well to prevent loss of lives on our highways as well as to ease vehicular movements,” Ajasa said.