By Ikechukwu Okaforadi
A think-tank group of the governing party, the All Progressive Congress Legacy Awareness and Campaign (APC – LAC), has revealed how President Muhammadu Buhari lifted the annual budget from the N18 billion under former President Goodluck Jonathan, to N260 billion in 2016.
This is contained in a statement issued yesterday by the Director General of Progressive Governors Forum (PGF), Salihu Moh Lukman, former National Publicity Secretary of APC, Lanre Issa-Onilu, the Youths representative in the APC Caretaker Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC), Ismail Ahmed, and Tolu Ogunlesi, on behalf of the APC – LAC.
The statement titled ‘Reconstruction of Nigerian Roads under President Buhari’s Administration’, the group said this N18 billion annual infrastructure situation which the APC administration of President Buhari inherited, resulted in persistent skeletal funding, with attendant abandoned or slow-moving road projects across the country.
“Therefore, the APC administration of President Buhari’s first priorities were to increase the amount of funding available for road projects, while also ensuring the resumption of work on abandoned projects. In 2016, the President’s first full year in office, the roads budget went up to 260 billion Naira, for which about 200 billion Naira was released.
“Since then the Buhari Administration has cumulatively devoted significantly more resources to road and transport infrastructure than any other administration since 1999, and the results are starting to emerge, in roads, bridges, highways, rail lines and stations, and air and sea port upgrades”, the statement said.
The APC group said also that in the area of roads and bridges, work has since resumed on several stalled, abandoned or solution-defying road projects that were inherited, listing the Loko-Oweto Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Sagamu-Benin Expressway, the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, Onitsha-Enugu Expressway, Kano-Maiduguri Expressway, Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway, Obajana-Kabba Road, Ilorin-Jebba Road, Apapa-Oshodi-Oworonshoki Road, and several others are in progress, with some already close to completion, as party of the intervention.
It said a brand new bridge in Ikom, Cross River State, has just been completed, to replace a dilapidated steel truss bridge originally built five decades ago, as has a new border bridge linking Nigeria and Cameroon, in the spirit of regional integration.
It said further that construction work on the Second Niger Bridge, a contract awarded multiple times between 2002 and 2015, but constantly stalled for lack of funding, finally kicked off in 2018, with guaranteed funding, for the first time in the history of the project.
According to APC LAC, in 2017, construction finally commenced on the Bodo-Bonny Bridges and Road, linking Bonny Island to the Rivers Mainland, a project it said was first mooted decades ago, and awarded a number of times without success, prior to the Buhari Administration.
