The Minister of Works, Housing and Power, Babatunde Raji Fashola, has said there are about 300 roads currently undergoing repair across the country.
Speaking 0n Thursday, at the opening of the 4th Quadrennial Delegates Conference of the Petroleum Tanker Drivers branch of NUPENG in Abuja, Fashola said the present administration considered it as priority to build, repair and expand roads in order to boost economic activities in the country.
Fashola in his address at the conference with theme ‘Roads in Nigeria and the Impact of Petroleum Products Distribution’, said there are priority roads that the administration is committed to complete called A1-A4 which are the Lagos-Shagamu-Benin-Ore -Sokoto; Warri-Benin-Okene-Lokoja-Kano; Port Harcourt-Enugu-Onisha-Yobe; Calabar-Makurdi-Maiduguri roads.
He said the second priority roads are those that connect agricultural hubs to markets and cities all over the country.
Other roads are those that connect the ports and gateways and institutions of learning. Government has also embarked on strategic bridge maintenance such as the Tamburawa bridge, Third Mainland bridge and Tatabu bridge.
Fashola said the last administration in their 2015 budget only allocated N18 billion to all the roads in the country and only N9 billion was paid, but that this administration so far, has committed more than N250 billion to roads infrastructure.
He said no state of the federation was left out in the roads development programme of the present government, adding that contractors had gone back to site on major road projects across the country.
Fashola warned drivers to stop over-speeding, saying that while poor state of the roads accounted for less than 10 per cent of accidents, over-speeding by motorists accounted for about 75 percent of the total number of accidents.
The minister pointed out that besides over-speeding, other factors included breach of traffic rules, poor health condition and drug addiction.
In his speech, the National President of NUPENG, Comrade Williams Akporeha, noted that although the current administration has been working hard to properly fix the highways, a lot still needed to be done.
He said: “In the light of this, we earnestly call on the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency on Nigerian roads so as to attract urgent attention, as no economy thrives without good roads and effective transportation system.”
