South East Roads—The Scarcity Of Commitment

By

Eluma Obibuaku

eluma20@yahoo.com

In recent weeks the challenges of traveling within the South- East and parts of the South-South has received renewed impetus because of press articles and comments from government officials both in our state capitals and Abuja. The new Minister of Works has found fault with engineers in his ministry and local contractors. On their part, people who have had to suffer through these roads rightly find fault with the federal government because most of the major roads in very bad condition are neglected federal roads. For the people, the Federal Government is an obvious culprit because seldom have federal financial resources been expended in this region except perhaps during the 1966-1970 time period when the objective was to destroy rather than build. Although Nigerians seldom agree on major social issues, it appears that everyone who has ventured onto these roads, and all the people engaged in this debate agree on one thing---the roads are incomparably bad. Regardless of how much has purportedly been spent on these roads they are not suitable for transportation and colonialists with low expectations of Africans in terms of managing public infrastructure would be amazed at how poorly we have performed in this regard.

With respect to the arguments now raging regarding who should be blamed for the state of these roads, my view is that the argument should be focused more on finding a speedy and cost-effective solution to the challenge of poor roads and infrastructure in the South- East while removing the institutional obstacles that impede progress. Most of  these obstacles have been identified by the Minister and other contributors to this debate.  The basic rationale for providing public infrastructure ought to be economic efficiency and equity.  Roads in the South East serve an unusually densely populated area which includes major metropolitan cities like Aba, Onitsha, Enugu and secondary towns like Owerri, Nnewi, Nsukka, amongst others.  The combined population of these states is 11.1 million, and population densities range from 290 to 1,400 people per square kilometer, constituting some of the most densely populated areas in Nigeria.   States within the former East Central State, namely, Imo, Anambra, Abia, Ebonyi and Enugu state have a total land area of 28,234 square kilometers[1]---a little more than half the size of Borno State with 49,259 square kilometers. Road traffic in this region is also extremely heavy and distances between major cities are short relative to other parts of the country. As a result, economic efficiency of roads as measured by number of cars or trucks per mile per day is comparably higher than all but parts of western Nigeria. As shown below, distances between major cities in the south- east are negligible. One would think that the cost of building or maintaining these high value roads would be lower as a proportion of cars and population than comparable roads elsewhere in Nigeria. This idea can be extended to the cities of the South-South such as Calabar, Uyo and Port-Harcourt. Residents of these cities are geographically and culturally joined with the East thus share the fate of the South- East in terms of bad roads.

Source: Discover Nigeria with Spectrum Road Map

(Distances between any two towns can be found at the respective vertical and horizontal rows)

With regard to equity, the South East appears to have been short-changed relative to the four other zones in the country.  The only redeeming quality of federal character is that it is intended to provide comparable benefits to all parts of the country in order to foster a sense of belonging. The amount of money allocated to federal roads in the East have historically been lower than that available for other areas and the Federal Government has shown no interest in building public infrastructure within this region. According to press reports attributed to the Works and Housing Minister, the Federal Government has spent N148 billion on roads over the past 4 years. Of this amount, N5.13 billion was spent on the South- East. This region contains 11% of Nigeria’s residents and is home to close to 18% [2]of its population, but yet receives less than 4% of its spending on road construction. Again, as shown in the table above it would make sense if road construction spending on the East is lower than that of  the North given the difference in land mass, but there is no reason to believe that the condition of roads in the North should be better than those in the South East.

 Regarding roads that serve the South, the Owerri-Port Harcourt road is deplorable and the Aba, Uyo, Calabar road are in the same condition. Our South-South relatives traveling from Lagos, Northern Nigeria or other part of the country to this region would have to go through the bad roads in the east and the equally bad extension of these roads that lead to their destinations. This is in spite of the fact that the South-South contributes more than 70% of ALL federal revenues and by extension that of the Federal Ministry of Works.  It is clear that both the practice of funds allocation and the utilization of the allocated funds to meet the need of the driving public in the East/ South-South have failed the tests of economic efficiency and societal equity.

In the light of this failure it is not Minister Ogunlewe’s job to tell us who or where the fault lies. It is however, his responsibility to identify all the elements that have led to the failure of his Ministry and implement solutions to address these problems. The roads and other infrastructure in the South East are crying out for urgent solutions. If the solutions involve banishing local contractors, Igbo Engineers or indeed Nigerian trained engineers, then please dispense with them. We do not wish to die on eastern roads just so that certain “professionals” have jobs or certain local contractors obtain contracts. We are very interested in hearing your solutions to these problems. South Easterners are interested in learning when you plan to complete the rehabilitation of these roads and Enugu Airport. It is my hope that the Enugu Airport contract award recently reported by the press was made to a reputable non-local contractor.

In fairness to the new Minister, he created neither the problems nor the challenges that he faces at the Federal Ministry of Works. He has however created a great deal of press reports simply by acknowledging the problem and most of the press reports on this issue appear to contain a strong trace of skepticism. For those of us who care about the East/S-South his success in rehabilitating Eastern infrastructure is of the utmost importance and we are praying perhaps naively that he succeeds where others have failed. The road distances shown above do not suggest that maintaining and upgrading eastern roads will impose an enormous burden on Nigeria’s resources. Scarcity of funds is therefore not an acceptable rationale. The real challenge will be overcoming the overwhelming scarcity of commitment.