General News
11 November 2009
Emerging mega-road development business opportunities in Nigeria - Report by Mr. Chude Ojugbana, IRF Ambassador in Nigeria
Nigeria is an oil rich nation and the most populous country in Africa, with some 150 million inhabitants. Despite its rating as the 5th largest oil producing nation in the world, the country is still rated very low in terms of infrastructural development, especially with respect to transport related issues.
The view of the World Bank, as expressed recently by its consultant on Country Evaluation and Regional Relations, Mr. Basil Kavasky, is that Nigeria's weak infrastructure is taking too long to be revamped. According to Mr. Kavasky, "part of the infrastructure under reference is the country’s roads." In this context, he urged that “maintenance of existing roads should be the priority of government rather than the construction of new ones”. To illustrate and bring home the point, he commented that, "you don't rush to build a new house when the roof of the existing one is leaking and the kitchen has not been put in shape"!
A contrasting standpoint is taken by Kabiru Abdulahi, the Managing Director of IFR Members, the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency of Nigeria (FERMA). Mr. Abdulahi emphasises that Nigeria is a country where 80% of roads have exceeded their lifespan. In his view, "what is needed is total reconstruction and rehabilitation". He is of the strong opinion that carrying out repairs on such roads is no longer necessary, and "would amount to waste of funds since they are bound to fail within the shortest possible time".
Irrespective of which of the above viewpoints one adopts, however, the inescapable fact remains that the general state of decay of Nigeria's roads demands immediate attention. The critical nature of the situation is reflected in the tragically high road death statistics recorded by the World Health Organization in Nigeria. These attain as many as 32,000 deaths a year, with a significant proportion attributable to bad roads, and place Nigeria at the top of the worldwide list of nations with unacceptably high road traffic casualty figures.
Many public analysts attribute the state of road infrastructural decay in Nigeria to decades of culpable negligence on the part of Government and Government officials, arising from a mix of corruption and inadequate political will. However, there now seems to be a ray of hope for both road users and the road industry, especially in the rich oil Niger Delta region where the Nigerian government has made roads rehabilitation and development its major focus for the next five years. This new emphasis flows from the recent peace partnership initiative between the Nigerian government and the so-called militants of the Niger Delta engaged in a freedom struggle and agitating for more government attention. Indeed, the amnesty initiative extended by the Government to the militants has ushered in peace as well as an avalanche of new resource development which has inspired the Nigerian government's commitment to working with development partners and international road construction firms to make faster progress towards implementing the Government's agenda for the rapid socio-economic development of the Niger Delta; a region hitherto enmeshed in a crisis, characterised by militant attacks on strategic oil facilities, that not only reduced oil production by 700,000 barrels per day below Nigeria's OPEC quota of 2 million, but also spawned criminally-minded gangs who took advantage of the genuine concerns of people and groups in the Niger Delta to exploit every volatile opportunity to perpetrate acts of kidnapping (mostly of foreign oil company workers for ransom), rape, murder, robbery, vandalism and sabotage. The recent resolve of the Federal Government of Nigeria to stamp out such criminal tendencies in the Niger Delta region has produced an Action Plan, which constitutes a key platform for significant remedial actions to address the underdevelopment of the region. The plan includes a focus on infrastructural development, particularly with regard to new roads and maintenance.
Already, budgetary provision in billions of dollars has been made and resources have been allocated to intervention agencies like the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).
A variety of current opportunities have been opened for road construction companies through these well-funded intervention agencies. Moreover, given that the issue of addressing the Niger Delta crisis is a top priority of the Nigerian government, it is expected that willing road construction companies will be greatly facilitated and spared much of the red tape and bureaucracy usually associated with project execution through government establishments in Nigeria. Now that funds have been voted to address the problems of Nigeria’s ‘roads of death’, a new day dawns for road industry participants, including IRF members, who may be interested in undertaking the many gigantic road projects proposed in the Niger Delta Action Plan of the Nigerian Government.
