Vision 2020: Nigeria needs N600bn annually to increase road network to 200,000km
In order to bridge its infrastructure deficit, especially in the road sector, Nigeria needs to spend yearly an estimated amount of N600 billion on its road network to increase it from the present 60,000 kilometres to 200,000 kilometres.
To realize its dream of joining the league of 20 largest economies by 2020 and also move towards sustainable economy commensurate with Vision 2020, the country also needs to increase her total road network from the current 193,000 kilometres to over 300,000 kilometres by 2020.
Mike Onolememn, Minister of Works, who disclosed this added that Nigeria cannot overcome its road infrastructure development challenges unless necessary reforms were instituted to reposition the road sector and bring it to a level commensurate with its peers in the developed and emerging nations.
He spoke at the 2013 Extra-ordinary General Meeting (EGM) and Workshop organised by the Association of Consulting Engineers of Nigeria (ACEN) with the theme ‘Road Sector Reform and the Nigerian Engineering Practice’.
The minister who was represented at the EGM by Bashir Yuguda, the Minister of State for Works, said that Vision 2020 required that Nigeria attained a GDP of at least $900 billion and GDP per capital of at least $4,000 by the year 2020.
“Experience has shown that there is a direct link between economic growth, and the size and condition of road networks. For every $1 spent on road maintenance, there is a corresponding increase in the nation’s GDP. The nexus between road development and economic growth made it imperative for the improvement of road network through new approaches requiring a paradigm shift”, he said.
According to him, “change in the institutional structures that will separate policy, regulation, operation and management of roads will be pivotal to road sector reform.”
“Standard practices around the world, he said, provided for “separation of client and supplier functions to improve efficiency and increase accountability, constitution of public-private oversight boards that bring user’s perspective to management decisions, commercialisation of road agencies operating at arms length from parent ministry, adoption of modern management information systems, procedures to improve decision-making and improved dialogue with political leadership”, he pointed out.
He noted President Goodluck Jonathan’s desire to urgently re-engineer the road sector through institutional and policy reforms that would make road transportation efficient and affordable to Nigerians while keeping it attractive for private sector investment.
E T Ujege, who delivered a lecture at the EGM, noted that the rationale for road sub-sector reform was “poor performance of the sub-sector due to, among other things, too many road agencies (over 800 of them); poor and outdated institutional framework for the management and funding of public roads, and inherited colonial PWD management structure that persists, adding that ministerial structure for road management was cumbersome, while choice of projects was still subject to political influence.