Hon. Ogbuefi Ozomgbachi, representing Ezeagu/Udi federal constituency of Enugu State, is the Chairman, House Committee on Works. In this interview with Ruth choji, he urges the federal government to increase the funding for road projects. He also says Nigeria will soon start constructing roads with concrete because of its durability.
Since you took over this committee, what you would say are the challenges you have faced?
The main challenge we face in this committee is what all Nigerians face on a daily basis with the state of our roads infrastructure – the dilapidating nature of roads in Nigeria; it is so bad that the House passed a resolution? on the deplorable nature of roads in Nigeria.
We even planned to conduct a public hearing on the state of the roads – to make you understand how serious we take the issue. The condition is unacceptable and something must be done about it because roads are a critical infrastructure and it has multiplier-effects on other sectors of the economy.
Now, since that resolution was passed by the House, what has been done to repair the roads?
We invited stakeholders, like contractors and others, but because of lack of funds, we have not been able to conduct the public hearing. But we went round and did an oversight on the roads and we have seen with our eyes the situation.
But the federal government has pumped in huge sums of money into road construction; was the committee able to find out why these roads have not been fixed?
When we look at the share of the road sector from the national budget, it will appear that stupendous? amount has been spent on it, but I have to say that what Nigerians must know is that we have not been appropriating enough funds for the construction of Nigerian roads.
Of course, there are other reasons, like lack of capacity by the supervisory agents, engineers from the Ministry of Work, to ensure that contractors perform according to standard, lots of cases of compromising standards and not complying with standard specified in the contract document; these are there, but the major thing responsible for the state of our roads is funding gaps. I travelled to Washington to attend Nigerian/US infrastructure summit.
After the summit, we went to the State of West Virginia to tour some mega projects being done by some agencies. We were taken to a road inter-change where they built flyovers and roads to connect one another; that interchange in the state of Virginia we visited? is about 500 metres and it cost the state $670m for just one project. This is equivalent to the budget of Federal Ministry of Works? for a year.
Sometimes you hear that the Ministry of Works’ budget is about N150bn a year but the utilization is poor. It sometimes depend on releases, but look at the State of Virginia, that $670m was just for one project they took us to another project – the dualisation of 10 lanes that cost $1.3bn in the same state.
That is almost two years’ budget of Federal Ministry of Works. They showed us another project that they were going to deliver in five years that runs into billions of dollars. So if we want to have the best infrastructure, we have to increase funding to the roads sector. The funding must not depend on annual appropriation.
Are you advocating the private sector to come in?
Yes, that is the reason why we are encouraging PPP – public private partnership. Some of these projects I mentioned that we saw in Virginia have PPP, but to do PPP, there must be certain incentives that must be created. There must also be no gap in the funding; a? certain amount? of money has to be set aside so that if the investor is not making up, the federal government will have a way of encouraging them by reimbursing them.
Road infrastructure is a social amenity and government cannot do it alone and you don’t treat it as a business thing entirely; it should be a social responsibility. The investor is coming in to help the state, but government should also be able to bear part of the burden.
But no investor will invest where he will not gain; what will be the gain to the private investor who invests in road projects?
What they stand to benefit over time is that we have to have toll plaza on Nigerian roads. The reason why we do not have toll plazas is that we cannot put them where the road does not exist or roads where you have serious potholes or dilapidated roads. There are certain roads in Nigeria that are viable roads because of the volume of traffic. We need to bring in investors there.
The traffic volume on this roads is heavy, but in order for this things to work, we need to have constant power and security. The enabling environment must be there; the current bank lending rate is too high in this country. Unless people have go offshore to borrow, because other countries have concessional rates; they give to investors to invest in critical sectors to boost the economy.
This includes single digit interests, some of them at 5% or 4%, and the maturity age of the loans, like the one we visited in the State of Virginia, is 25 years. So if you do this, the investor will know that he can borrow money at a single digit interest rate and has a enough time to recover before he starts paying the loan.
Some state governors have tried to delve into road construction believing that the federal government will refund the monies and this has brought lots of problems between the states and federal government; what is your take on this?
I believe that when state governors involve themselves in roads reconstruction, there should be well articulated agreements between them and the federal government on how to refund the investment. But in doing that, it has to be transparent. The state governments that want to do federal roads must work in synergy with the Federal Ministry of Works on the road to be done and the design. They have to be sure that the? designs are consistent with the quality that is acceptable to the ministry.
The problem we have is that some of this state governments, in their desire to bring dividends of democracy to their people, went ahead and did the roads and later came back to the federal government for refund, but by the time the issues are settled, it drags. In the past 10 years or so, I am aware that a number of governors have made claims to the Ministry of Work amounting to several hundred of billions of naira.
The issue is that a ministry that has a budget of a hundred and something billion per annum will find it difficult to make these refunds because even the annual budget of the ministry cannot liquidate the debts. So we have to look at it and see the one that will be refunded because it is going to be a long-term thing. We have to be realistic about this and, like I said, road network is a social amenity.
Are you comfortable with the way road contract are given to foreign companies at the detriment of local ones?
I have looked at the process of procurement of roads as any other procurements that are done in accordance with due process and the public procurement act. This thing is competitive and advertisements are sents out for people to express interest, especially pre-qualification or what they call technical bit, competence and capacity of the contracting firm; thereafter is the financial bit.
When companies submit their technical bit, they are processed depending on the findings, and those contractors are pre-qualified. I am not aware of any design to exclude any contractor, whether foreign or local, from participating in the procurement process. If any contractors have been marginalized in anyway, they should report to the committee and we will investigate it. It is a matter of engineering companies having the capacity to do certain magnitude of road projects; that is why they are classified into category A, B and C.
Some of the conditions are that you must have done a certain volume of work and your state of account in the bank shows that you have done certain work. I think the problem is that some Nigerians companies have not been able to meet up with this volume of work stipulated in the rule.
Naturally, some of these foreign companies have this advantage because they have done some of the mega works in Europe, Asian and other foreign countries. There are also some indigenous companies that have the capacity to do such projects and I don’t see any reason why they should be excluded.
We have had situations where roads will be completed but within a year or two, the road will start wearing out; what the committee is doing concerning such roads and contractors?
We have introduced the application of technology in our oversight duties. This is the first time a Committee on Works of the National Assembly is using technological equipment to determine the solidity of pavement. We procured equipment like coring machine so that when we? get there, we do coring: we bore into the pavement and bring out samples? and subject it to laboratory analysis to ensure compliance with approved specification because we are also concerned about the failure of roads done by these companies.
A good road, no matter the magnitude of traffic, should be there for at least 10 years before? wearing starts. We have had reports? of such incidents in the past. When we get such reports, we send it to the ministry and if they challenge any of our finding, we do joint inspection and take the specimen to our laboratory and they too take theirs to their laboratory. When the joint report comes out, we use the result as confirmation and the contractor will now be required to do work according to specification. We cannot condone failure again; we want Nigerians to get value for their money.
Roads in the South East? are regarded as the worst in the country and, fortunately, you come from there; has anything been done about the roads in that zone?
For me as an easterner and also chairman of this committee, the challenge is enormous and the easterners feel that they now have the opportunity of fixing the roads. But as I am talking to you now, even when you look at the 2013 budget proposal, it does not appear to me that we have been able to appear at a concrete solution to the problem.
It takes six hours to travel from Enugu to Port Harcourt instead of two hours: cars get stuck; you meet lots of gridlock; Enugu/ Onitsha road is another thing, before we talk about the Second Niger Bridge because, as we are talking? right now, that bridge is going to collapse soon. So, it is only a radical approach that can solve these problems.
People have been challenging me about the state of these roads; a member asked me if the South East is still part of Nigeria, what am I doing about it. But I believe that the National Assembly has been sensitized enough to know the state of the roads. We in the 7th Assembly are looking for ways to see that there is an increase in appropriation for these major roads.
If you are to make a rough projection on how much it will cost Nigerian government to fix our road network, what will it be?
For us to fix the over 30 federal roads in Nigeria, we should be looking for almost a trillion naira if not more that. The problem is the funding gap. When they award a contract that will be completed in 38 months, because of funding gap, the roads are not completed on time and the prices keep being reviewed up. Look at the Abuja-Abaji road, when the contract was awarded, it was supposed to be completed before five years.
It has lingered and it is almost in its seventh year, and given the funding pattern in the budget, it could take another five years. Once there is funding gap, it has triple effects, so there will always be request from the contractors for review of the funds. I think we are also trying to migrate from asphalt road construction to concrete-based construction. We have enough cement resources to do that. Analysis has shown that in terms of cost of concrete-based construction, the difference is only 10%. In the long run, it is cheaper and lasts longer.
What advice will you give the federal government on how to fix our road network?
As I said earlier, I believe that every government should have priority of what it wants to do. One major area should be road sector, and to deliver on the road sector. If it is taken as priority sector, what it is given should be reasonably high and concession should be given to certain roads. I also believe that making budgetary allocation to the roads is not enough; we are working on a legislation that will create a Federal Highway Commission that will take major funding of our highways away from annual budgetary appropriation.
It will be less bureaucratic, and the authority will have the powers to give mechanism that will give enough funding. We also need to increase the allocation of the budget: an allocation of N153bn cannot fix our roads; it is too meager to make any impact on the sector. We have the Kano-Maiduguri, Ninth Mile-Makurdi-Nassarawa road, if you look at the pace, it will take another 12 years to finish it. The same thing for? Abuja-Abaji highway; these are strategic roads that we have to deploy enough resources to finish them in time.