The Lagos Ibadan expressway is an enigmatic symbol of Nigeria. Great potential but poor ability to follow simple professional maintenance and supervision rules. Is this incompetence or a Lagos -Ibadan expressway ‘curse’? Yes, there are contractors making pedestrian flyovers and repairing bridges. Good! But did they know that tens of thousands of vehicles of every description, size and speed driven by drivers of every temperament and degree of arrogance ply the road? After all, those drivers have collectively endured 15 years of broken promises and serial 2–12-hour delays on that same road which has a history of other contractors often treating the motorised public like dirt.
We all thought the delays were over.
Clearly the suffering continues. Are the delays a deliberate power play by the contractors for more money? There is little or no sense of purpose or urgency on the part of the hard-hatted contractor staff, often working on ones and twos apparently unsupervised. The past week has shown a sad reality of our management capacity and demonstrated the well-known yawning gap in our management capacity. We just do not appear to care. Do they know about quality of work and time management? Sadly, last Saturday at the narrowed-to-two lane spot were two stationary vehicles with their drivers standing between them and arguing spiritedly. As vehicles were now forced from 3 to 2 and then just one lane, the accumulated traffic quickly grew to 4-5 lanes and stretched four kilometres. It was like witnessing a tragi-comedy seeing the easily preventable causes of the reduction of the road lanes from 3 to 2 and then from 2 to1 by recalcitrant drivers.
The FRSC were never there and were elsewhere interrogating some vehicles, unconcerned with the need to free the bottleneck. Certainly there are no traffic drones in FRSC Command and Control Centre yet.
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After this terrible weekend, we know that the authorities are alarmed and are stepping in. Really? Do the authorities not do preventive ‘possible scenarios’ and ‘possible catastrophes’? For construction work, do the authorities not alert FRSC to man the narrow points for quick pre-emptive resolution of road-conflict issues? Do the authorities not run ‘traffic games’ to identify what consequences to plan for in case of a traffic complication during the work of the contractor? Do the authorities not insist on the speediest methods of roadworks to keep disruptions at zero or at least a minimum as happens when such works are done in other countries worldwide? Do the authorities even consider the road users when they are doing their job?
Recently, the forest accumulating within the road median and the actual narrowing of the road by accumulated dirt and weeds in some places was pointed out in this column to the authorities. We await a serious regular maintenance and clean-up in keeping with best road maintenance standards in oversight of a recently rebuilt multi-billion naira road. It is shameful to see the dirt accumulated and sometimes corn growing in it and the road actually yielding a whole lane to accumulated dirt at the side of the road.
There must be a maintenance contract and the winner of that contract has woefully failed to achieve the goal – road cleanliness. It has previously been suggested on many occasions that because the federal government has been proven repeatedly incapable of managing the micro-cleaning of roads, the road should be divided into five or 10km segments and given to the surrounding community to maintain. If this is done, the officials of the federal government have merely to drive up and down the road once a month and write report scoring the maintenance level and indicting those who failed to complete their assignment.
Periodically in the past, road maintenance units for inspection and maintenance have been announced on the political horizon, hailed as breakthrough, billions allocated and then a few vehicles appear on the political stage as ‘Instant Road Works’ saviours. This has been all ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’ permanent for the joy of road users. For how long will we behave with such ignorance of the true value of predictive planning, maintenance and supervision and preventive measures in our life? Meanwhile, our citizens sit, stuck in needless traffic jams in a country struggling to become a country-sitting ducks for criminals? At the minimum, the authorities need to immediately contact and recruit FRSC to the areas of potential traffic problem during construction work. Secondly, the authorities need to get contractors to expedite their work with removable road barriers which are mostly to protect their lives. The blockage should be removed every evening when there is no work and no one to protect overnight. There is a danger that some vehicle will run into those barriers and that would be a tragic preventable crash.
As we face the current onslaught of terrorists and kidnappers and the increasing boldness of armed robbers in the towns and cities across the country, we must recall that the greed of the political class has had a negative impact on criminals. That greed has set the political class apart from the citizenry. It is time for politicians to, rein in their greed and publicly cut their salaries and perks, and cancel the much abused constitutional projects from the national budget. We look forward to one National Assembly house, not two.
