Naija@53: Policy inconsistency, corruption ruin gains

In 53 years, Nigeria has operated varied policies in the transport sector under different guises of transformation.

Successive administrations at federal and state levels have always found reasons to tinker with whatever transport programme their predecessors left behind. They often sweet the old schemes aside, initiating new ones. This, experts note, offers them a good excuse to vote huge amount for the execution of the new projects.

Opinions are divided on the level of progress the nation has attained in the transport sector under eight military rules and seven civilian administrations since independence.

Some say every segment has received appreciable attention in terms of budgetary allocations; but many note there is hardly any justification for the allocated funds, insisting that it is all ‘motion without movement’.

Corruption has denied the nation the expected gains of its moderate investment in the transport sector. For instance, virtually all the 50 new locomotives supplied by China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation under the N50bn railway transformation contract were reportedly grounded less than five years later.

The President, Aviation Round Table, Capt Dele Ore, said anytime he recalled how politicians squandered the resources of the once vibrant but now liquidated Nigeria Airways, he felt like crying.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is never tired of telling the story of the Nigerian National Shipping Line. Established in 1959, the state-owned company was unable to compete with European lines, despite heavy investment. Heavily indebted, the NNSL was liquidated in 1995 and all 21 of its vessels sold.

The President of the LCCI, Mr. Goodie Ibru, in a statement on Nigeria at 50, said, “The economy is inhibited by serious issues of infrastructure deficits, especially with regards to power supply, currently at less than 4,000 megawatts; transportation, logistics, the quality of institutions, cost and access to funds etc. All these have combined to create a burden of competitiveness for domestic enterprises.”

In their recent review of the transport system, which was published in the ‘Journal of Sustainable Development Studies’, Chris Igwe and his colleagues stated that right from the inception, the transport systems had been poorly designed and could, therefore, not meet the demand of the growing population.

They noted that the flawed design “causes traffic congestion on roads, overstressed railways, faltering airfields, and mass-transport blind spots.”

The Director-General, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Muda Yusuf, recalled that in the 1970s when the railway system was functional and effective, it was moving goods including cattle from the North to the South and petroleum products to different parts of the country.

“But today, the tankers and trailers have taken over, putting a lot of pressure on the road. And one is not surprised that many of our roads are now in a bad state,” he said.

He said a trip from one end of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway to the other, which would not exceed 45 minutes, could now drag from two to four hours, depending on the time of the movement.

Many have described the road as a death trap.

After many years of neglect, heavy death toll and high volume of injuries resulting from accidents, the Federal Government recently drafted Julius Berger Plc, the contractor that built the road, to rehabilitate and expand it under a four-year contract worth N167bn. Before then, a concession contract for its reconstruction and maintenance awarded to Bi-Courtney Highway Services was terminated four years after.

The case of the Sagamu-Benin Expressway built many years ago to link the West with East is not any better, according to a transport expert and the Managing Director, Newsletters Nigeria, Dr. Oscar Odiboh.

He said the high level of degradation on the road currently had made it almost impassable at several points and motorists were forced to make a detour to the bush paths.

A report by the Corporate Nigeria, an annual business, trade and investment guide, stated that of the nation’s 194, 200 km of roads, the Federal Government controls 17.6 per cent; 15.7 per cent are state roads and 66.7 per cent are local and rural roads.

“In May 2010, the government said that it was planning to reclassify the roads in order to shift some of the burden of maintenance off the Federal Government.”

But Odiboh noted that nothing had really changed, stressing that from Lagos to Abuja, Kano to Maiduguri and Onitsha to Port-Harcourt, many of the roads were riddled with potholes, deep gullies and in various deplorable stages.

For community roads, the situation is more appalling, according to him. “The government often times thinks about developing roads after many people have settled down in their new estates and communities; but in civilized nations, the roads are constructed along with other basic facilities ahead of the settlement,” he stated.

The new thinking in the government circle is the involvement of the private sector in road construction, rehabilitation and maintenance under the Public Private Participation arrangement.

In the automobile industry some 50 years ago, Odiboh said emphasis was on transfer of technology. This gave rise to the establishment of about six auto assembly plants with two in Lagos, one in Kaduna, Bauchi, Ibadan and Enugu. Peugeot Automobile Nigeria Limited of Kaduna was churning out new Peugeot cars; Volkswagen of Nigeria offering Beetle cars, Nigerian Truck Manufacturers in Kano assembling trucks and luxury buses coming from the stable of the Anambra Motor Manufacturing Company Limited, Enugu.

But Odiboh noted that inconsistency and lack of continuity in the transport policies were largely responsible for the eventual failure of the effort.

Although he said all the assembly plants had been privatised after many years of inactivity, many were still moribund as the nation relied on imported fully built vehicles, just as used vehicles or Tokunbo market enjoyed good patronage.

A vibrant railway system was bequeathed to Nigeria by its colonial masters but about four decades of neglect was what it required to ‘castrate’ the transport mode, experts, including the President of the Nigeria Union of Railway Workers, Mr. Ralph Okoro, said.

Many agreed that Nigeria with its size of population (160 million people), should not expect any meaningful economic development if it continued to neglect its railway system.

Ironically, just as some experts said money allocated for the resuscitation and modernisation of the railway system was grossly inadequate, other noted that the funds were largely mismanaged in certain areas with shoddy job done.

Government is now looking in the direction of the private sector to turn the railway system around.

The Minister of Transport, Senator Idris Umar, said the Railway Act of 1955 would soon be abolished to allow interested private parties, including state governments to come into the business.

Umar, who also admitted that the railway required massive funding to make it viable, said, “If we are going to rely 100 per cent on the budget by the Federal Government, we may not get anywhere; we are seriously constrained by limited resources.”

Aviation and maritime are two transport modes that have also expectedly received considerable attention over the years.

In the maritime sector, poor policy implementation, inconsistency, and lack of skilled manpower are factors the operators listed as retarding the expected gains and contribution to the national economy.

Concessionaires have taken over the operation of port terminals; indigenous ship owners are now being lured back to the shipping business after many years of inactivity due to what their leader, Chief Isaac Jolapomo, describes as harsh and unfavourable government policies.

Many investors in domestic airline business have also gone under, especially after experiencing plane crashes.

The Head, Research and Statistics, Zenith Aviation, Mr. Olumide Ohunayo, however, commended the current efforts of the government in embarking on airport remodelling this year. But he noted that it was not ‘Uhuru’ in the industry.

He said, “The weakest links are the airlines; they are being bypassed financially. We need to kick start a revolution here not by starting a national carrier” but through stringent regulation of the industry.

Odiboh recommended an annual stakeholders conference on transport which would put government and the operators on the same page with the people using the different modes of transportation.

He stressed that the idea would also lead to integrated transport system in which all the modes would be properly linked to complement one another.