The Managing Director of Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, FERMA, Mr Gabriel Amuchi, an engineer, in this interview with Favour Nnabugwu in Akwa Ibom spoke on the palliative works on the nation’s roads in readiness for the festive season. Excerpts

FERMA’s funding?

We recognise the difficulty of appropriation and funding because of the several demands on government funds. So, we have started talking to the authorities on other sources of funding for the agency to be able to back up our arrangement for massive road repairs in the country. We have started looking at government having to approve certain areas of funding that may not have to depend strictly on appropriation.

FERMA is also making efforts to reduce its dependence on funding from the Federal government budget by way of collaborating with the private sector through the Private Public Partnership PPP, and mounting border posts like International Vehicle Transit Change, IVTC to fund the operations of the agency.

FERMA MD, Gabriel Amuchi

The number of Federal roads in good condition climbed from 15 per cent in 2007 to 27 per cent in 2010; roads in what could be called fair state moved from 20 per cent to 29 per cent, poor roads dropped from 30 per cent to 10 per cent while bad roads came down from 35 per cent to 34 per cent.

Transit International funding?

Immediately l assumed office, we renewed the request for the formal approval and as at last week, we have forwarded another letter through the Minister of Works to the President for us to commence the international transit vehicle collection on a small scale from every critical borders.

With time, we will develop the modalities to ensure effective collection, effective utilisation and publication of the process so we are very hopeful that the final approval to commence the operation will come.

Ministry of Works retreat

The management retreat of the Ministry of Works is a critical one. If you watch closely, you will see that all the stakeholders on road repairs and construction engineers are here. That is to tell the importance of the retreat. The Minister takes it very seriously and everybody is putting heads together to get the best result.

You can see further from the brainstorming so far that everybody is enthusiastic to get the best result; you can also see from the contributions made so far by the directors.

So, at the end of the retreat, we will be looking at how we can find lasting solutions to road projects without necessarily waiting on government appropriation alone. We can get funds from other options such as the concession, build, operate and transfer.

If you go to some countries and buy an exercise book, you will pay tax no matter how small and the token is channeled to road maintenance. Those are all the options we are putting together and lam sure at the end of the retreat, decisions will be reached to help government and the authorities on so many other ways of funding.

Attitude of Nigerians to roads: We are also going to look at our habit in this country. Road failure is related to habit such as road abuses that we need to stop on time. You build a road and Nigerians come soon after to block the drainage channels. Of course, it is an abuse to excavate on the shoulders of the road.

All those processes are what we are trying to put together in FERMA to check and stop those abuses so that we don’t willfully destroy newly built roads. The road is of great importance to the socio-economic life of the people.

In this country, road development started like foot part and moved to patch holes and then progress into simple surface dressing before we started designing roads and a lot of roads were built during the oil booming era but there were no maintenance programme in place to repair those roads as they were getting old.

So, with non-performance of the rail lines, all our transport came back to the roads and they got distressed and collapsed. So, we what we are doing is continuous recovery in FERMA for preventive maintenance. That is to say if we recover a road, we don’t allow the road to degenerate back to the original state. In the next few weeks, we will be launching the first preventive maintenance programme.

We have commenced patch works allover the country because most of the roads have degenerated a lot and we realise that patching alone will not provide all the solutions. All our road engineers across the country have been directed to continue road patching from now to December to make the road motorable.

That is in progress as we speak and within the available resources, we send funds on a monthly basis to our offices to ensure that the programme continues. We have also deployed patching equipment to critical and economically viable roads to ensure those roads don’t fail between now and December.