By Sonala Olumhense
The history of modern Nigeria drips with the blood of hundreds of thousands of citizens who died needlessly in road accidents.
One of them, a final year university student who was killed on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, had been my closest friend. I share the anguish of all those families and friends whose lives changed forever in one horrible instant.
Most of those lives are lost in long-distance driving, often on federal highways. Sadly, Nigerian governments continue to fail the challenge of constructing and maintaining them. As a man who loves to travel by road and who has never experienced the convoys and sirens of officials who are too important to see those roads as they really are, I have tried to keep myself informed and to write about them.
Last April, in a two-part piece on this page, I first reported the current Minister of Works, David Umahi. He was refreshingly saying all the right things, so I gently invited him to take a hard look at himself in the mirror to make sure he understood the journey ahead.
Listening to his analysis was somewhat impressive, and I commended him. “But the problem is much broader than that,” I wrote, “and Mr. Umahi, as well-meaning as he might be, ought to step back and undertake a comprehensive review of the ethos and mission of his Ministry, its departments, capacities and personnel, and the political habitat of its operation.”
The Minister was describing how horrendous the Lokoja-Benin City highway—which I described as being “at best one-hundredth of the task” before him—was, but that he would reconstruct it in six months.
“While he is in front of that mirror,”I said, “I will talk about whether he will leave Nigerian roads much better or much worse.”
I concluded the second part of that essay by citingEyemark, an app launched by President Muhammadu Buhari just months before leaving office allegedly for Nigerians “to monitor and evaluate capital projects, in real-time,”and Citizens’ Delivery Tracker,a duplication app unveiled by the Tinubu government.
“It is another illustration of how parallel, multi-level, multi-year, multi-administration, uncoordinated, incoherent, incompetent chaos in planning, spending and execution has given Nigeria not simply the world’s worst infrastructure, but also the largest assemblage of uncompleted projects, including in rail, schools and hospitals,” I said.
I reminded the Minister that since the 2003 scandal in the PDP over roads under President Olusegun Obasanjo, “Every government that has come along since then has thrown a lot of money and speeches into building roads, but the more money and speeches we have had, the worse the roads have become. This is the bottomless pit that confronts Minister Umahi.”
“If [Umahi] is not to join the league of former Works Ministers who shed fake tears, he must admit that the terrible state of Nigerian roads is man-made,” I concluded. “He must rethink and revamp Works altogether.”
That was just eight months ago. During this period, two prominent things have happened. The first, stunning one, is that Umahi has not honoured his boast to complete the Lokoja-Benin City in six months. According to many reports, that project has not even begun.
Anywhere else in the world where pride and honour mean anything, Mr. Umahi would have resigned or been fired. It never matters what the excuses are: when your family name is on the line, you defend that first.
The second thing that has happened in these eight months is even worse: the Minister is defending something he calls his “achievements.”
In the process, he insulted AderemiOseni, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA), who had questioned his productivity, citing collapsing highways.
During a committee hearing, an angry Mr. Oseni, who was addressing a FERMA representative, dismissed Umahi’s claim concerning of resources being responsible for his abject performance.
“You are not here to tell us what we already know in the area of resources,” Oseni said. “So, if you are telling us the reason you have failed in fixing our road infrastructure is because of resources, don’t let me take you up on that because you concentrated your energy as a Minister on less priority (sic) issues.”
Umahi, who did not attend that event, forgot that Oseni is in the House as an elected representative of the people, just like House Speaker Tajudeen Abass, is not as an appointee or a civil servant.
“Let me say that I was not physically present, nor my permanent secretary, because nobody can talk to me like that in my presence,” he said, turning on layers of Ministerial arrogance.
He then declared that out of respect for the Speaker of the House and the National Assembly, he would not join issues with Mr. Oseni. He bragged that he is levels higher than the chairman, has never failed, and that Oseni has not attained even half of what he has.
Now, there have been nine Cabinet-level Ministers of Works in the Fourth Republic. Every one of them has been measured by their performance in terms of what they delivered on roads as Nigerians experience them daily. There have been boisterous men. Loud men. Even one weepy woman, briefly. But the measurement remains the same: what did you deliver in terms of miles of good roads, new and honestly refurbished, to save Nigerians from death and suffering?
Of those nine Ministers, seven served three PDP governments in 16 years, and they delivered a world of propaganda and deceit. Nigerians, reeling from the pain, elected the APC in 2015, and Mr. Umahi is that party’s second. Together with Umahi’s predecessor, Babatunde Fashola, APC’s Ministers of Works have, in nine years,delivered a performance that parallels the PDP, but with helpings of arrogance and hypocrisy.
The question at the House was never, where have you been, Mr. Umahi? It was, and is: what are you doing with Nigerian roads?
Mr. Oseni, speaking on behalf of the Nigerian people, was right that Mr. Umahi is not serving the public interest for which the Senate told him to “bow and go,” and that Nigerians are dying. That public interest is that there is no evidence Mr. Umahi intends to deliver on his words.
One such death, in February 2005, was of a predecessor of Umahi’s in Works: Major General Abdulkarim Adisa. Like many Ministers, he cared far more about the office than about Works. Sadly, after he was brutally hurt in a road accident, they flew him to London for medical care. Where a good road may have protected his life, he had not invested himself in building them.
Of him, I wrote Dying in London in March 2006, and published a few of the reactions I received.
By coincidence, that same month was when President Obasanjo abruptly fired from his cabinet another of Umahi’s predecessors, Adeseye Ogunlewe, a humiliation that was never explained. In dark circumstances, and into the dark, went another Minister who left Nigerian roads no better than he had inherited them.
We’re talking about effort, Mr. Umahi. Give us something to acknowledge you for. And respect democracy and apologize to Representative Oseni.
Sonala Olumhense is a syndicated columnist
