NACCIMA urges government to take road maintenance as priority

According to NACCIMA, government should, as a matter of urgency, "give priority to road construction and maintenance for an effective transport system management by providing adequate, reliable and integrated infrastructure for road, rail, air and waterways transportation in order to achieve supply chain efficiencies."

The chamber while giving more recommendations on government’s plans to boost the economy this year, says government should develop inland waterways by dredging the River Niger so as to create inland ports at Onitsha/Idah.

And immediately commence the rehabilitation of existing federal and interstate roads that are characterised by potholes.

The chamber also advocated for the adoption of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement.

Some specific roads begging for urgent attention the chamber observed include the dualisation of Aba-Ikot Ekpene-Uyo-Calabar road, dualisation and speedy completion of the East-West road in the Rivers, reconstruction of Aba-Owerri, reconstruction of Port-Harcourt road in Aba metropolis, Onitsha-Owerri Road, Shagamu-Benin dual carriage way, etc in order to enhance trade and commercial activities within the area.

During the year, the government planned to embark on highway construction and rehabilitation; dredging of River Niger from Lokoja to Warri; construction of 2nd Niger bridge and the bridge across River Benue; refurbishing and equipping federal health institutions; Capacity building and training of 5,000 health staff; and embark on Power Transmission Plants (PTP) and National Integrated Power (NIP) Projects in Niger-Delta with expected generation output of 2,555MW of electricity.

" While we welcome government’s continued focus to give priority attention to the identified infrastructure, human and social development in some sectors of the economy, we are of the opinion that government should demonstrate sincere commitment towards ensuring that these projects and other vital ones are carried out by the concerned ministries, departments and agencies while appropriate legislation and regulatory framework should be institutionalised for public-private sector partnership in their execution."

The chamber also noted government’s desire to generate additional 2,555MW of electricity in 2008 through the PTP and NIP projects in 2008 saying " it is indeed, a welcome development, especially considering the fact that with the substantial whooping money already spent in the power sector, the power supply situation has not witnessed any encouraging improvement, which calls for a rather proactive/drastic measure to be taken to transform the service delivery system of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to achieve at least the 10,000MW supply of electricity promised.

While we also commend government’s commitment to the acceleration of the on-going rehabilitation of our road networks throughout the country, we wish to counsel that in order to address the reoccurrence of the magnitude of dilapidation on our transportation networks, we suggest, among others that:

It also calls for urgent conclusion of the privatisation of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) to allow private sector investment for efficient management and effective service delivery to the citizenry.

In addition, government should intensify more efforts in completing the proposed regional rail network plan under PPP arrangement.

It emphasises that the regional rail network plan should include the North-South, East-West, Inter State and Intra State

Government should intensify more efforts to ensure that the mega-city project initiative, which hopefully would change the face of metropolitan Lagos and parts of Ogun State, to a status that is befitting of the Commercial and Industrial Capital of our nation, is completed as planned.