A photograph gained notoriety on the social media last week. It was a washed away asphalt of a road constructed at Ohanmi in the Owan East Local Government Area of Edo State. Said to have been awarded by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the four-kilometer asphaltic road spanned Uokha and Ohanmi areas. In less than three months of its construction, the road got washed away, as revealed by the photograph. A federal Permanent Secretary is even said to hail from the area.
Construction of roads of such inferior and substandard quality has cast Nigeria in bad light in the eyes of the world as a country of anything goes. A few months earlier, a video of another road in same Edo State had become a subject of discussion on the social media. The question is, how did such quality of work, under a federal ministry, go through the well-known construction bureaucracy and get certified as done?
The blight of haphazard construction of roads and other infrastructure has become a major nightmare in Nigeria. Apparently fueled by the slide into the hub of corruption and lack of rigour in every facet of life in Nigeria, a phenomenon of this type has wriggled itself into our national life.
Between those who award the contracts and contractors who get the contracts, there is an absence of fidelity to the need and desire by society to have infrastructure that endures. When construction works of this quality are done, the people lose two ways. They are the ones expected to make use of those infrastructure which they cannot and their money, used to fund the projects, goes into private pockets.
That such an eyesore could happen, and has indeed become a pattern, calls for serious concern. Nigerian roads are suffering severely from this blight that has almost become a Nigerian phenomenon. It will seem that the most profound way to attack the problem is for governments to award contracts to contractors who in turn must be made to legally adhere to an agreement. The agreement must spell it out that contractors who fail as in the Uokha and Ohanmi road, must get the roads back to shape as a matter of must, failure of which attracts sanctions.
On this Uokha and Ohanmi calamity, both the contractor and those who awarded and passed the road as having been executed should be made to face sanctions.
