State of Roads in Nigeria

By Jide Osuntokun

As a young man, I enjoyed driving on Nigerian roads. The roads were much better than they are now. It also seems as if the Ministry of Works took its job much more seriously than they do today. Their officials did not collude with contractors to reduce stones, cement and tar that were used for constructing the roads and they seemed to last longer than they are today. Of course there was less traffic and in those days, trains ran on the railways and heavy haulage was done by rail not by land. Some people have suggested that those put in charge of the railway corporation deliberately ran down the corporation so that their trailer business could thrive. Whatever the reasons for running down the railways, the consequences are that the haulage business and their huge articulated trucks have not only ruined the roads, they have become a health hazard to our people. Efforts to revive the railways have not succeeded. Apparently because of lack of commitment and poor funding the result is that the only way of moving goods and people in the country is by road. The aviation industry which could have contributed substantially to the movement of goods and people is expensive for most people. This is why the question of the roads is almost a matter of life and death (pardon the pun). Without movement of goods, services and people the economy will not grow. This is why government has to pay attention to the health of our roads. In the northern part of Nigeria where the rainy season is short and where the land is flat with little or no mountains and hills except on the Jos and Bauchi plateaux, roads are much more easily constructed and maintained than in the south. But up north, the spatial distribution of population in wide areas and the size of the land mass that had to be traversed increase cost of construction in the north. In the south, roads sometimes have to pass through mangrove swamps and the rain forest and on large bodies of water leading to high cost of road construction. Unlike in many parts of the world where colonialism led to infrastructural modernisation, Nigeria inherited from the British overlords, poor network of roads. Roads leading out of Lagos at independence were winding narrow roads going to Abeokuta and Ibadan and subsequently to the east. To go to the north one had to pass through the tortuous roads from Lagos to Ibadan then to Ilorin and to Jebba across the Niger then to Kotangora, Tegina, Kaduna and then to Kano, Jos, Bauchi and Maiduguri. These were narrow and meandering roads that are not comparable to the roads we now have even though the new roads are poorly maintained. There is a need for a comprehensive review of the road network in Nigeria. First of all, we have to agree that the hinterland of Nigeria has to be linked to the coast. What this immediately suggests is that there is need to have four longitudinal roads- one running in the western part of the country from Badagry to Sokoto, another from Lagos to Kano, a third one from Warri to Bauchi and another one from Calabar to Maiduguri. Then there should be an east-west road linking Lagos along the coast to Port-Harcourt. If we have this type of autobahnen in the country, then it will be easy to move around the country and this will foster a sense of unity and rapid economic development. The coastal road from Lagos to Port-Harcourt has been on the drawing boards for several decades yet no action has been taken. Because the road will have to pass through mangrove swamps necessitating the building of many bridges, it will be very expensive but it is doable. If we do not have the money, this is the kind of project that a country should borrow money to do because it will pay for itself. All these roads should be toll roads so that their maintenance and the recovery of the initial cost of construction can be seamlessly taken care of. This is what is done in civilised countries. And now that we have declared ourselves the largest economy in Africa, we should have something to show for it. Already there is a dual carriage way running from Lagos to Port-Harcourt through the Sagamu-Benin-Onitsha-Enugu-Port-Harcourt dual carriage way. There is another one running from Lagos to Oyo and on to Ilorin if and when the Oyo-Ogbomosho section is finished. There is a dual carriage way from Lagos to Abeokuta. This should have terminated in Ibadan if we have some sense. There is a dual carriage way from Abuja through Kaduna to Kano and then to Maiduguri. The Kano-Maiduguri dual carriage way is probably the longest in Nigeria and cannot be truly justified on economic grounds. The Abuja-Lokoja dual carriage way is under construction and substantial amount of work has been done. Perhaps in the future, the Lokoja-Benin sector would be constructed. The Benin-Warri-Yenagoa-Port-Harcourt east-west road is also at an advanced stage of completion. In all this road networks, the South-west is being short changed. The dual carriage way from Ibadan to Akure stops abruptly in Ilesa and this does not make economic sense because Ondo and Ekiti states produce 80 percent of Nigeria’s cocoa and substantial amount of hard wood timber. One would also have expected a dual carriage way to link Ado-Ekiti and Akure and Akure with Benin. If we have the current powers and resources of the federal government devolved into the regions or zones, roads to link areas with economic potentials and resource availability will be constructed but as it is today, roads are constructed on political basis thereby economically shooting ourselves in the feet.

One of the ways to assess the economy of a country is through its transportation grid. A country that is not in permanent motion is underdeveloped if not a dead country. A visit to any modern country will show goods and peoples being moved around by water on the high seas, by rivers, by air, by surface trains, by tramp cars, by underground trains, by fast trains, and by roads so that there is no delay in moving goods around because time is an important factor in economic development. Our primitive level of development only uses roads in transportation and this shows how much far behind we are in relation to the rest of the world. The British left us with a functional railway system just as they did in India. As populous and chaotic as India is, (at least they are seven times larger than us), they have managed to keep the trains running while we have run our own down and out. It is a shame that unlike before, we no longer have development plans in this country. Before the advent of the military into power in Nigeria, we had quiquennial plans by which some of these issues I am raising would have been taken up and debated and then put in a plan of development over the years instead of just building roads on the spur of the moment and largely for the political and not economic considerations; things would have been done on rational basis. The time may have run out for people of my generation but certainly the younger people of Nigeria should take the bull by the horns and deal with the problems of today in a systemic and systematic way so that their future will be brighter than ours. The current leaders of Nigeria will not have an excuse for not handing over the country in a better way to future leaders because of lack of ideas. The ideas are blowing in the winds and all they have to do is catch the vision. The rest of the world is not going to wait for us; in fact they will laugh at us if we continue to remain static at this primitive level of development. We have the people and the resources, then what is the problem really apart from the greed and corruption of our people particularly our leaders? Let the word go out that this generation of Nigerians and the generation to come will hold the leaders of our country responsible for this terrible state of underdevelopment for which they have consigned the country. The backward network of roads is just the tip of the iceberg in our level of underdevelopment because every other aspect and facets of our life are crying for developmental attention.