“The Roman Road is the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people. It runs across mountain, marsh, and river. It is built broad, straight, and firm. It joins city with city and nation with nation. It is tens of thousands of miles long, and always thronged with grateful travellers…”
– Robert Graves
In 2018, traveling on the A4 Highway that runs from Jimeta and terminates near Bama is one of the worst roads I have ever traveled on, an unpaved detour that will take you to Gayafa Village in Hong Local Government Area of Adamawa State.
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Despite traveling in a Toyota Hilux 4-wheel drive, I still had to hold on to my belly as my internal organs hurtled painfully to the pulse of the excessive undulating nature of the road, this is certainly one of my worst travel experiences. The state government officials who were escorting us to a Victims Support Fund outreach program to distribute education materials remarked that a river on that stretch could overflow if it rained, which would ensure that we could be stuck there for days.
According to figures from the 1999 CIA World Factbook total kilometer of roads in Nigeria was at 194,394 km while paved roads is 60,068 km (including 1,194 km of expressways) with unpaved roads at 134,326 km (1998 est.). Twenty years later similar data from the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission puts the figure at 195,000 km of road network out of which about 32,000 km are federal roads and 31,000 km are state roads. A total of about 60,000 km are paved leaving 135,000 km of road untarred. This is aside the attendant dilapidation that has occurred from a near total absence of repair and maintenance of failed sections in the last 20 years.
This means that in more than twenty years, road development in Nigeria has been very marginal, the demerit of this development can be glimpsed when investment in road infrastructure is measured against the billions of dollars in earnings from oil receipts and the number of kilometers not added to the national and international road infrastructure masterplan.
However, we are indeed at the crux of a life changing government policy. Earlier in the year President Muhammadu Buhari signed a 10-page Executive Order No. 007 known as the “Companies Income Tax (Road Infrastructure Development and Refurbishment Investment Tax Credit Scheme) Order, 2019” described as a Public-Private Partnership intervention to enable government leverage private sector funding in a manner that creates value for money through private sector discipline.
The Executive Chairman of the FIRS Mr Muhammad Mamman Nami, as one of the key drivers of this policy, has stated that Nigeria’s economy presently relies heavily on non-oil revenues to meet its statutory obligation of paying salaries and providing other dividends to Nigerians. “Without the tax that you pay, governments at all levels would not be able to fulfil their mandate to the electorates. Tax money also helps to ensure the roads you travel are safe and always in good condition,” he said.
The FIRS is also benefiting from other new thinking from Nami, there are modifications that have started yielding results with the collection of N4.2 trillion between January and September 2021. This is alongside the attaining of 114.66 percent of the VAT collection in the first 6 months of 2021.
The regulation of the Order provides for a Management Committee to be chaired by the Minister of Finance while the Minister for Works will be the Deputy Chairman. Other members drawn from both ministries and other MDAs are trade and Investment; Justice; BPE; FIRS; NIPC; SEC; Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission; Budget Office; NBS; NSIA; and Civil Engineers that would be hired by the Federal Ministry of Finance.
With Nigeria being a signatory to the African Continental Free Trade Area and the subsequent ratification by 22 other states, Nigeria’s strategic location with its coastal proximity makes the Trans-West African Coastal Highway starting from Lagos connecting Westwards to Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Ivory Coast with diversions into Burkina Faso and Mali equally strategic. This will also no doubt enable us to give a thought to the ambitious Lagos-Mombasa Highway through Cameroon to Central Africa and DR Congo. No doubt these will key into the overarching goal of boosting trade relations and poverty reduction.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has keyed into this program with its intention to construct a total 1,804.6km of roads at a total cost of N621,237,143,897.35 billion across the 6 geopolitical zones, this giant leap under the auspices of the Road Infrastructure Development and Refurbishment Investment Tax Credit Scheme by the NNPC is nothing short of a masterstroke if well implemented.
If truth be told there have been stellar policies of government towards qualitative and sustained infrastructure in the past. Post-independence development witnessed Nigeria’s implementation of the first development plan (1962-1968) and the Second National Development Plans (1970-1974). These were scuttled by the frequent change in government and the attendant inconsistency in government policies which invariably have had disastrous consequences. This is one idea that must not be let to die at the expiration of the Buhari Government; it should be sustained until equilibrium is achieved in road infrastructure, in the end the roads won’t build themselves. If we must transcend our socio-cultural and economic challenges we must build and maintain good roads, like American President Lyndon B Johnson once reminded us that the Roman Empire controlled the world because they built roads. To control our collective socio-economic destinies we must also build roads.
Alkasim Abdulkadir is a Media and Communications Specialist. He is the COO of Nigeria Numeric, a data aggregating start-up and is a regular commentator on public affairs.
