BY OIKONOMIA WITH LEKAN SOTE
Recently, a nephew, while lamenting the insecurity and sluggish growth of Nigeria’s economy, did not fail to recognise that the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has done a lot on the execution of transportation infrastructure. It’s as if travel projects are the raison d’etre of its existence.
Transportation are activities involved in moving humans and their goods from one point to another, using any of the following five means, viz; roadways, railways, waterways, airways and pipelines (for liquid substances like water, petroleum and petroleum products), within a country or across the world.
No one doubts that the Buhari government, which has woefully failed on other matters, like security, fights against corruption and has wrought nearly nil workable macroeconomic policies, has done a lot on transportation infrastructure.
You can see the, albeit the slow pace of work on roads and railways, even if some of the trains have started breaking down. You can also observe that many state governments –especially that of Lagos– have joined the bandwagon of providing road projects, bridges and flyovers.
Construction work on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Second Niger Bridge in Onitsha and the vexing rail line from Kano, in Nigeria, to Maradi, in Niger Republic, where President Buhari has first cousins, is very evident, and cannot be denied.
The other day, Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, rode on the new railway line from Abeokuta, Ogun State, to Lagos, and told Nigerians about it. And, maybe not to be outdone, First Lady Aisha Buhari and her entourage took a return trip from Kano to Abuja after paying some condolence visits.
But it does look as if the Ministries of Works and Housing and of Transportation that are respectively responsible for constructing roads and laying rail lines are working in silos and not in agreement, though their briefs should be complementary.
Ideally, both ministries and the Ministry of Aviation, ought to work in tandem so that the movement of commuters, farm produce and industry manufactures have some synergy.
The development of roads, rail, and air travel infrastructure should be coordinated with those of waterways so that goods coming into, or out of, Nigeria will be handled swiftly with minimum delay and discomfort.
To get better results from the use of Nigeria’s transportation system, the Federal Government and state governments must first conduct a census of farming corridors, manufacturing hubs or clusters and petroleum depots.
Then they should intentionally link them to one another and to settlements where consumers live. You know that the goods will be of no use if they do not get to the market in a timely fashion.
Indeed, there should be a master plan that integrates roads, rail lines, airports, seaports, rivers, farms, industrial plants, distribution centres and the communities of the citizens who consume the consumer good live.
“Indeed, there should be a master plan that integrates roads, rail lines, airports, seaports, rivers, farms, industrial plants, distribution centres and the communities of the citizens who consume the consumer good live”
In his book, “The Sexual Wilderness,” American writer Vance Packard argued that roads and the automobiles that ply on them are the most visible hallmark and definer of human life of the modern and urban civilisation.
If you check how America’s Ronald Reagan Airport (former National Airport) and Britain’s Heathrow Airport are linked by road and rail to Washington, DC and the City of London respectively, you will agree there is a need for comprehensive inter-modal transportation that links urban and rural settlements.
This should provide seamless assists to growing the Nigerian economy and raising the Gross Domestic Product. The assurance of quick and easy delivery of goods is a great contributor to achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of Nigerian citizens.
The Minister of Transportation should have a word with either the Commissioner of Works and Housing or even the Governor of Oyo State to construct a “civilised” approach from the city to the Ibadan station of the rail line.
There should be easy access and exit to the railway station. This lack is discouraging many who would have loved to travel between Ibadan and Lagos by rail.
A recent report indicated that on Saturday, February 12, 2022, a train ride between Lagos and Ibadan was interrupted because some criminal elements vandalised the rail track. This is dangerous and demoralising.
It is also important to site petroleum products depots and dealerships at strategic locations so that tankers and railways can have easy access to the storage depots and strategic reserves.
One must admit, though, that aviation fuel is already strategically sited near airports. And petrol filling stations are reasonably spread out across the country, though it’s quite inadequate in most of the Northern part of Nigeria where, in some places, water tanks suffice as petrol stations!
In addition to rehabilitation of major road and rail arteries, the government needs to speedily complete the East-West Coastal Road and the Calabar-Lagos rail line to link entire Southern Nigeria, though one must be realistic that the current administration cannot accomplish these in less than 15 months to its exit.
You will agree that the Second Niger Bridge, that links Eastern Nigeria and Western Nigeria, and the Niger Bridge that links Northern Nigeria to Southern Nigeria, are certainly inadequate to cope with the demands of the Nigerian economy.
Also roads, rail lines and bridges should be construed to link North East to North West, the entire band across the Middle Belt and diagonal routes from both the North East to the South West and the North West, through the South East to the South-South.
And if Nigeria is interested in taking advantage of the huge market in the Economic Community of West African States and the Africa Union, the government should offer to extend its road and rail networks to all the countries–Benin Republic, Niger Republic, Chad and The Cameroons– with which it has common borders.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highway of America, sometimes simply referred to as the Interstate System, is a nationwide network of roads that run throughout the length and breadth of America.
This network of roads that serves major airports, military bases, rail or truck terminals, oil and gas storage and pipelines, even hospitals, is complemented by the Amtrak railway line. The idea is to enable any American to be able to move with minimal hindrance and to access whatever they need to survive as human beings.
These days, Americans do not only want to move themselves and their goods across the country, they want to move their data with ease and speed. That explains why Internet access for all Americans became a matter of national policy and politics.
The real-time access to information causes billionaire Bill Gates to boast of the capacity to do business at the speed of thought. The capability to move anything is crucial for the economic stride of any nation. If you like, you could say that mobility is the oxygen of economic development.
There is actually an Act of the American Congress (or legislature) directed at developing a national Internet networking infrastructure. And it has become so successful that, as at 2019, about 90 per cent of Americans had access to the Internet, notwithstanding whether they use it or not.
Imagine a Nigeria with extensive road, rail, water and air travel facilities, with Internet access to its nooks and crannies. Nigerians will achieve more than they can at the present time that they are being served with inadequate road highways and Internet superhighways.
