Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja

The Acting Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA), Nurudeen Rafindadi, has said the only way to have durable roads in the country remains the introduction of rail system across the country.

Rafindadi who spoke with Daily Sun in Abuja said apart from using weighbridges to check overloaded vehicles on the highways, making use of the rail would reduce the weight of vehicles on the highways, which would in turn enhance the lifespan of the nation’s roads.

Rafindadi said, “the reality is that the road sector is carrying 80 per cent, 90 per cent plus of our total load of cargo. It shouldn’t be so. The Minister of Transport mentioned some time ago that we have 30 million tonnes of cargoes on the Lagos-Kano axis every year, and the road sector is taking over 90 per cent of that. As soon as we have more efficient and effective railway system, it will take substantially the burden off the roads.”

Among other issues, Rafindadi explained the intervention plans FERMA is undertaking to ensure good and motorable roads across the country.

Excerpts:

The job so far

I resumed towards the end of September or effectively, first week in October. The resumption date included having handover briefs from the outgoing management of FERMA and discussing key issues of concern to the agency, making note of all those important issues that we needed to look at, making note of the challenges that I found on ground and almost immediately deciding that we needed to tackle the challenges in order to make any move forward.

Quick intervention programme

We have 38 offices across the country, each of them headed by federal road maintenance engineers with office, staff and facilities. And the first directive I threw at them was, compile for us, all the bad portions along the federal highways network in your state. We compiled a compendium of those bad portions with complete description of what the problem is, what is the solution, idea of the costing and the period for execution and pictures. That gave us a long list out of which we had to put some criteria and brought out a shortlist of all the most critical areas, which we thought we should move in quickly.

And what were our criteria? Our criteria were that those bad spots should lie on the critical arterials, the trunk roads, particularly because those highways of the federal highway network that had high traffic during the holiday season, end of the year and New Year period. That was how we brought out the quick intervention programme. We put a cost to it, we made a submission to the Ministry of Works, we told the Senate committee and there was a lot of interest and that was how we got the mandate to go ahead and we did.

So, from the beginning, at the time I resumed, we were very low on financing but we had plans and ideas on what to do immediately we got some funds. We didn’t really get the funds until towards the end of December but at that time, we had planned and we were ready to go. And as soon as we got some modest amount of funding we moved and that is where we are now.

The nature of the problems we were addressing included emergency repairs on bad potholed sections of the highway, immediate reinstatement of washouts, which means the road had collapsed under a culvert or bridge; vegetation control, which means bushes have overgrown the sides of the roads to the extent that they were impeding visibility and causing security risks. Those were the areas we concentrated on.

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Most federal roads have outlived their lifespan

Typically, when you build a road like any other structure, it has a life period. The process of maintaining a road starts with the Ministry of Works building the road. Immediately after the construction, we go through a one year period of what they call defects liability in which the contractor who built the road is responsible and at the end of that period, there is a handover to FERMA to take on the maintenance. From that point on till the end of the life of the road, it should be subjected to periodic and regular maintenance. So, in an ideal situation, the job of FERMA should be to undertake regular inspection of the roads and identify bad spots and try to fix them as soon as we observe them.

The problem is that for most of the roads, they have actually reached the end of that life and our maintenance is gradually forcing us to turn to supervise and find, not potholes and so on, but supervise and identify critical areas where the road is about to totally collapse; where culverts are about to totally collapse and get washouts; where bridges are about to be overcome by their weakness. We identify them and give them priority. That is what we are doing now. Next, we find the areas that are of extreme inconvenience and we try to ameliorate as much as possible and for the comfort of the drivers. There are some that we really can’t do anything about because they have reached the stage of requiring total rehabilitation or reconstruction, which again is the responsibility of the Ministry of Works. We liaise back with them and tell them that we need to do something about it.

Overloaded vehicles

The normal thing is that there should be a regulation as to the weight of vehicles that can be allowed on the road. If there was proper and total regulation, such vehicles would be identified and even stopped on the highway by highway inspectors or Road Safety or Vehicle Inspection Officers and identified and told to go off the road or really unload. But the plan is that weighbridges should be reintroduced back at the toll gates, which is what the minister talked about recently and those vehicles that are seen visually to be overloaded with the weight on the weighbridges, adequate controls would be maintained. That is the only way.

But talking more generally, this is a reality of the transport sector of the country. The reality is that the road sector is carrying 80 per cent, 90 per cent plus of our total load. It shouldn’t be so. The Minister of Transport mentioned some time ago that we have 30 million tonnes of cargo on the Lagos-Kano axis every year and the road sector is taking over 90 per cent of that. As soon as we have more efficient and effective railway system, it will take substantially the burden off the roads. But even then, the roads would continue to play the role of evacuating from the goings on, from the hub points of the railway. 

Paucity of funds

The immediate quick intervention is to try to canvass for more funding in the budget. Secondly, when the allocation in the budget is adequate, we want more releases. What has happened in the past is that the budgetary allocation itself was not sufficient. It is certainly lower than what it has been in the past. But the release was even less. That is why I was telling you that at the time I resumed in October last year, the release to FERMA was less than three and half per cent of what the budget allocation was for capital projects. And for the incurrent budget, which we use to deal with emerging situations, we had got only five months at that time out of the 10 months of the year. It is beginning to yield some fruits. Towards the end of the year, we got two additional months of the recurrent and we had some money for the capital, which we are still processing now until we begin to access.

Beyond budgetary provisions, we will continue to look for special funding, special interventions, which include ecological funds, special funds for the rehabilitation of the Northeast infrastructure, special funds for Niger Delta and special funding or support from the Ministry of Works. 

Public Private Partnership (PPP)

And PPP of course! The issue of PPP is of such importance to us. We had a meeting with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) and we want to try some of the PPP initiatives that can bring together, private enterprise and private finance in government support and take specific cases of pilot PPP projects on our roads. We want to do a pilot of that and demonstrate the effectiveness of using PPP in maintaining those roads that are viable and hopefully, in the future, we scale it up when we can demonstrate the benefit.

Current state of the FP 5 mobile pothole patchers

From what I learned from the records, the patchers were procured about seven years ago and they have been launched. I am aware that they are in service and I have certainly seen them from the reports we are getting from our field engineers. You are not likely to see all our equipment on the site because by their nature, they won’t come on a good road. They would basically stay in our workshops or extremely bad sections where they can be deployed.