THERE IS AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT GOING ON IN EVERY STATE – FASHOLA
By Oki Samson, Trek Africa Newspaper
Honorable Minister of Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola SAN
The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola has assured Nigerians that infrastructure development, maintenance, and management lies at the core of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s strategy for growing the Nigerian economy, creating jobs and prosperity, and lifting people out of poverty. He shared this optimism in his goodwill message to the Plenary Session of the National Infrastructure Summit organized by the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE). The conference which held two days ago was themed ‘Towards a Sustainable Infrastructure Development, Maintenance and Management in Nigeria’.
The Works minister emphasized ‘a nation cannot grow bigger than the capacity of its infrastructure and President Buhari’s commitment to infrastructure leaves no one in doubt about his desire to rapidly grow Nigeria’s economy. The outline of that infrastructure development is made clear by the fact that the Ministry of Works and Housing is currently managing over 800 contracts for Roads and Bridges covering over 13,000 kilometres of the 35,000-plus kilometres of Federal Highways and Bridges. In every state of Nigeria today there is either a Road project, a Bridge project or a Housing project or all combined under construction.’
The learned Fashola added that infrastructure development ‘is a critical driver for employment of professionals for design, surveys, and construction practitioners. It also galvanizes other sectors like mining for gravel, sand, laterite, crushed stones to mention a few, while it drives the demand and supply of lubricants like diesel, and oils, as well as bitumen production and supply. The transport sector is also driven by the need to ferry these inputs across distances from production sites to construction sites by thousands of Trucks employing drivers. At the construction sites, the urban poor earn their daily living from supply of skilled and unskilled labour by working the materials to finished products.’
Trek Africa Newspaper gathered that the design, construction and governance on these projects account for only about 30% of jobs in the Industry. This implied that maintenance plays far greater role in the Buhari infrastructure agenda. The The former Governor of Lagos state pointed out ‘it is maintenance and operation that provides 70% of the sustainable jobs long after construction has ended. This is why the Buhari Administration must take the credit for approving the first ever FGN Facility Management and Maintenance policy in March of 2019. Implementation is now bearing fruits with 24 Federal Secretariats now fully rehabilitated and under a facility management contract. Thirty-seven Bridges nationwide are now undergoing maintenance and repairs, some of which have been due for decades.’
Other groundbreaking projects ongoing in various parts of the country include Lagos – Ibadan, Enugu – Port Harcourt, Abuja-Kano, Kano-Maiduguri, Enugu-Onitsha, Oyo–Ogbomosho, Ilorin–Jebba, Abeokuta –Ibadan, Calabar – Itu , Second Niger Bridge, Ikom Bridge, Loko – Oweto Bridge, Ibi Bridge and Bamenda – Mfun Bridge, Chanchangi Bridge, Bodo Bonny Bridge and many more. It is important to state that the Buhari Government has commenced the process of developing a new Infrastructure Master Plan that will lead up to 2030.
