By
UGO ONUOHA
The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria is unequivocal: the security and welfare of all Nigerians must be the primary purpose of government. Yet, decades of neglect, poor planning, and elite indifference have turned the nation’s highways into deathtraps, exposing citizens to danger, delays, and economic loss. Federal roads, meant to connect communities and enable commerce, have crumbled under the weight of neglect and overuse, while successive administrations have prioritized grand projects over the basic maintenance that ensures safety and wellbeing. This failure on the part of those in power reflects a deeper disregard for the constitutional mandate and the everyday lives of Nigerians.
For the avoidance of doubt, we will reproduce aspects of the relevant constitutional decree. Yes, decree, because the prescription was made to be obeyed. It did not make room for any administration to offer excuses in lieu of compliance. Under the headline The Government And The People, Chapter 2 of the Nigerian Constitution states in part: (1) The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be a State based on the principles of democracy and social justice. (2) It is hereby, accordingly, DECLARED (emphasis mine) that: (a) sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority; (b) the SECURITY and WELFARE of the people SHALL BE THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT…(again emphasis mine).
It is unlikely that the intention of the framers of the prescription of the “primary purpose” clause in the constitution was that the government would spoon feed the citizens. No. But even in its severely distorted form, this country can still lay a modicum of claim to operating a capitalist economy. In effect, the least expectation is that this regime as well as preceding administrations should provide an enabling environment at all times for Nigerians to thrive. This should not ordinarily be difficult for any service – driven government to deliver. Here are a few things that will qualify any administration to be said to have met the constitutional prescription. Ensuring security of life and property is at the core of the matter. Without security every other thing will be virtually impossible to accomplish. Then there’s the issue of providing access to affordable and quality education. This should be a matter of priority for any administration that understands that human capital is key to the development of a country, and not necessarily the abundance of natural resources buried under the ground. Of course, next but not necessarily in that order, is access to health care. Sickly people translate to a sickly society.
Can we say of a truth that this has been the lot of our people since the return to democracy in 1999? Certainly not. Yes, there may have been flashes of sanity in how our rulers treat the commonwealth, but the image we have of our rulers has been that of marauding bandits. The majority of our rulers have been what my Igbo people call “ikiri”, the tenacious animal that never lets go of its prey, or “usu biara orji ntagbu”. Our rulers fit those that the Good Book (Holy Bible) refers to as devourers. And because of our shortsighted and extremely selfish rulers, Nigeria is virtually on its knees. It has been laid bare and belly up.
The insensitivity, nay wickedness, of any regime can be gleaned from how it treats its citizens in prioritising the provision of basic infrastructure. And the regime of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu lived up to its reputation as an uncaring government in the days before, during, and after the celebrations of Christmas by Christians. I am not unmindful of the fact that Christmas has become a global cultural phenomenon which celebration transcends Christians, and incorporates people of other faith. In spite of its global stature, Christmas remains essentially a key and sacred event in Christendom.
For the avoidance of doubt, Christmas has fixed date in the calendar irrespective of the variant of the sect. The Eastern Orthodox church marks Christmas around April while the majority of Christ followers where Nigerian adherents belong celebrate Christmas in December. So, it has not been unusual for successive governments to make special preparations for ease of celebrations ahead of time. Christmas does not depend on the sudden sighting of the moon or the occurrence of other elements in the cosmos. This is not to denigrate the practices of other faiths, but it is to emphasize that Christmas celebrations in the modern era do not depend on the whims of any person or authority.
This may be the reason why late in November of 2024 works minister, Dave Umahi, (a self acclaimed professor of practice) assured the country that all federal roads would be made motorable before Christmas of that year. It appeared he worked furiously to deliver on the promise, but he failed. Miserably. If we are to be charitable, we have to admit that his failure was not for lack of trying. What, however, we can not say for certain is that his promise to do remedial work on federal highways was imbued by manifest sincerity. For a regime that’s essentially driven by propaganda and hollow promises, he might have been playing games with Nigerians. Those who thought that Umahi’s word was his bond believed him, took to the roads, especially the very busy Lagos – Sagamu – Benin – Onitsha expressway. To varying degrees, users of that highway passed through the valley of the shadow of death. But most of the travellers that year made it to their destinations unscathed in comparative terms.
So ahead of this December Umahi kept his cool. He refused to run his mouth. He made no such promise in spite of the fact that federal roads including the Lagos – Onitsha road had gotten worse. Last year, the contentious portion of the highway was mainly the Benin bypass. This year almost the whole stretch of the road had deteriorated badly. Travellers from Lagos to all parts of the east and parts of the south south zone started to contend with traffic jams from Sagamu (construction work), then Okada just before Benin where a vehicle-swallowing manhole in the middle of a bridge had remained unrepaired for going to one year. After surviving the Okada broken bridge complete logjam, travellers would then start the tortuous manoeuvring and meandering through the Benin bypass. If hell in the Holy Bible is a place of torture and gnashing of teeth, then Benin bypass was hell on earth for users of that road this season. Many did not make it through. Some spent hours and days for a travel time between Lagos and Onitsha of normally six hours. Any driver on that road this season will spend a minimum of 15 hours to make. I was among the fortunate people on Sunday, December 21.
Unlike in the past years, the same travelling nightmare was visited on commuters plying the Abuja – Lokoja – Benin highway. That so-called expressway is already notorious for being a haven for kidnappers, bandits, and terrorists. The trauma of road users trapped and made sitting ducks on that highway this Christmas and New Year season is better imagined than experienced. A senior journalist who has had a stint working in the presidency recently related the experiences of a cousin who plied that route days before Christmas. Of course, the traumatized cousin barely it on time for Christmas in Lagos from Abuja. Lagos – Sagamu – Benin – Onitsha – Enugu – Owerri – Aba, and Abuja – Lokoja – Benin highways are not peculiar in terms of torturing road users. The truth is that virtually all federal roads are broken. They are deathtraps. They constitute clear and present dangers to lives, limbs, and livelihoods of Nigerian road users. And our rulers know about the state of these roads, though they do not use them.
If you ply this country’s highways, at any period and more so in the rainy season, you will not need to be persuaded that our rulers are “thoroughly wicked”, to borrow the words that bishop emeritus of Ondo Anglican Diocese, the late Emmanuel Gbonigi, once used to describe former head of state, the late Gen. Sani Abacha.
It may be uncharitable to heap the blame of the sufferings of road users on Umahi and Tinubu. But they should take the flak because they are the people who are now in office and in power. If Nigerian roads are broken, and they unmistakably are, it is the result of years of neglect and especially of lack of vision by successive rulers.
Certainly, our highways are broken, they are seldom repaired and maintained, they are hardly reconstructed, and they hardly met the minimum global standards at the time of their construction. But our freeways fail essentially to lack of vision. The roads are exposed to all manner of traffic. Our roads are the major mode of transportation of humans and cargoes. Articulated and heavy duty vehicles constitute menace and hazards on our roads. They bear the burden of transporting everything from logs (wood) to petroleum products to cement to iron rods and everything in-between. Given this situation, the roads that are ab initio poorly constructed collapse under the weight of trucks. Of course, these vehicles which have seen the better days of their lifespan in Europe, North America and Asia before being dumped in Nigeria suffer frequent breakdowns on the highways and become accidents waiting to happen to cars and buses and hapless road users.
For the life of this country since 1960, our rulers have neglected and failed to develop the rail and the rivers/seas as alternatives to travelling by road. Are travel has been made the exclusive of the elites. The ruling elites have also conspired to develop only the seaports in Lagos. Recently, the relevant authorities announced multi trillion Naira impending further investment on Lagos ports. Meanwhile, the seaports in Koko near Warri, Calabar, Port Harcourt, and Onne are underdeveloped and underutilized. The potential for a seaport in the south east is an anathema to the ruling elite who are the winners of the civil war (1967-1970). The net effect of this visionlessness or wickedness is that almost all container goods come into the country through the ports in Lagos. And they include containers meant for manufacturers and markets outside Lagos and the south west. Studies have since established that many of the containers that are shipped through Lagos ports are destined for the south east. This means that they have to be trucked by road to the east and to destinations elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Lagos ports are perennially congested and ineffective. They routinely lose business to the seaports in neighbouring countries.
Indeed, bad roads were responsible for the traumatic experiences of travellers this season, but the situation was compounded by the fact that broken down trucks littered the Lagos – Onitsha highway. Some of the articulated vehicles tumble and rest on their backs because of the bad roads. And these trucks included petroleum products tankers which spill their inflammable liquids on the road. Such vehicles and their spilt products constitute obvious danger to other road users. They are incinerators waiting for victims. Many travellers have been so incinerated.
It is in the midst of this state of the highways that the Tinubu regime embarked upon a N15 trillion Lagos – Calabar coastal road. All entreaties to the administration to prioritise the recovery of the broken roads nationwide before the coastal road project fell on deaf ears. To demonstrate how much the regime holds Nigerians in utter contempt, it proceeded to award the coastal highway contract to a long-standing business partner of President Tinubu, without public tendering, without competitive bidding, ahead of determining the route of the road, without budgetary provisions at the beginning, without firm assurance funding sources, and without environmental impact assessment report. The president and his Kept Man, Umahi, rode roughshod over Nigerians in their desire to forge ahead with the project that had opacity and numbing corruption written all over it. It’s tempting to say that a people get the kind of leadership they deserve, but for the fact that the extant regime assumed office in 2023 under a cloud. And it has had to contend with legitimacy problems ever since.
UGO ONUOHA, A Veteran Journalist and reknown columnist was the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief, Champion Newspapers Ltd
