FG releases list of 69 ongoing road projects in South East to further fault claims by govs

Apparently in efforts to fault claims that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has failed to carry out developmental projects in the South East, the Federal Government on Monday released a list of 69 ongoing road and bridge projects in the region.

Governors of South East states had recently accused Buhari’s government of neglect of the area.

Speaking through the director general of South-East Governors Forum, Professor Simon Otuanya, who presented a monitoring report on the performance of the 2017 federal capital budget in the South East, the governors had said:

“The capital projects implementation in 2017 did not fare well at all in South East states. The roads have remained impassable and so the Federal Government should please do better in 2018 and we hope that the Federal Government will make the improvement.”

The ministers of Information and Culture, and Works, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, and Babatunde Fashola, respectively, have since refuted the claim.

But in a fresh statement in Abuja on Monday, Mohammed who released the list of 69 ongoing projects in the South East said that though the contracts for many of the roads were awarded before the advent of Buhari’s administration, “they were either poorly funded or not funded at all, hence work on the roads has lingered.”

The Minister said the 69 roads and bridges, which are spread across the five states in the South-east, are now in different stages of completion, “thanks to the funding sourced by the present administration from budgetary allocations, the Sukuk Bond and the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund.”

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He said the government is also looking into the possibility of using a part of the recovered looted funds to fund the development of infrastructure across the country.

Mohammed had earlier last week while announcing projects which include the rehabilitation of the existing Niger Bridge as well as the construction of the 2nd Niger Bridge, assured that he was going to publish the full list of the roads and bridges, as well as give a state-by-state breakdown of the total figure.

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