From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, yesterday, disclosed that the Second Niger Bridge is ready and would soon be commissioned.
Speaking at the PMB’s administration’s scorecard, yesterday, in Abuja, the minister said that what is delaying the commissioning is the construction of link road to the bridge from both the Asaba and Onitsha axes.
“I can confirm that the Second Niger Bridge itself is finished. People can walk through it now. What remains now is the link road.
“If in 2015 the conversation was on the existence of a large number of abandoned infrastructure and the seeming lack of political will to complete those infrastructure in spite of the availability of resources and today the Buhari administration has made these possible in spite of lean resources; if in 2015 such critical infrastructure as the Second Niger Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway were either totally non-existent or in a very deteriorated state and if today the Buhari administration has demonstrated that needed political will to break the jinx on our nation’s historically most difficult projects, does it not stand to reason to conclude that the party which formed the government deserves to continue to deliver to the people of Nigeria these life-defining infrastructure” he said.
According to Fashola, the Change Agenda which was unfolded in the Ministry of Works and Housing in 2015 as part of the larger objective of the Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari was to grow the economy through the revamping and expansion of the nation’s infrastructure on a scale that has not been seen in a long while.
“Indeed, the Ministry of Works and Housing is present in all the states of the federation either through a road, bridge, National Housing Programme, Federal Secretariat or Special Intervention Project.” he said.
Explaining further, Fashola stated that in the last seven and half years, the administration of President Buhari has been very resolute in the pursuit of progressivism, which is globally recognised as the improvement of the human condition, pointing out that the administration has never abandoned any project of the previous administrations but rather, President Buhari gave a matching order to complete existing projects instead of starting new ones. ENDS