Buhari committed to upgrading national infrastructure — APC group
The All Progressives Congress(APC) Legacy Awareness and Campaign Group, says the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government is committed to upgrading national infrastructure across the country.
Mr Tolu Ogunlesi, one of the leaders of the group said this in a statement on Wednesday in Abuja.
“The President is determined to set new standards in terms of federal commitment to upgrading national infrastructure.
“And there is now no doubt that some of the projects Nigerians have most looked forward to in decades will be completed and commissioned between now and May 29, 2023, when his second and final term in office comes to an end,’’ he said.
Ogunlesi noted that the Buhari administration had cumulatively devoted significantly more resources to road and transport infrastructure than any other administration in the country since 1999.
According to him, the results are starting to emerge in roads, bridges, highways, rail lines and stations, and air and sea port upgrades.
He said that in the area of roads and bridges, work had since resumed on several stalled, abandoned or solution defying road projects that were inherited by the administration.
This, he said, included the Loko-Oweto bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Sagamu-Benin Expressway, Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway, Onitsha-Enugu expressway, Kano-Maiduguri Expressway and Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway among others.
Ogunlesi added that while some of the roads were already close to completion, a brand new bridge in Ikom, Cross River, has just been completed.
He said the bridge was to replace a dilapidated steel truss bridge originally built five decades ago.
“Construction work on the second Niger Bridge, a contract awarded multiple times between 2002 and 2015, but constantly stalled for lack of funding.
“Finally kicked off in 2018, with guaranteed funding, for the first time in the history of the project.
“Currently, according to the Ministry of Works and Housing, there are around 900 active road contracts,” he said.
This, he said, covered the construction, reconstruction or rehabilitation of more than 13,000km of federal roads and highways across the country out of a total of 35,000km federal roads in the country.
He said to break the financing jinx for large-scale infrastructure projects, the Buhari administration had implemented a number of landmark and innovative methods.
Ogunlesi said this included the setting up of the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF), in 2018, with 650million dollars in seed funding, deploying and Executing Presidential Executive Order 7 and the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme among others.
He said the initiatives were carefully designed and introduced to ensure that financing was no longer a challenge for road construction, rehabilitation and maintenance
The group leader said the initiatives was also to make the private sector a key partner along side the government in the development of critical road infrastructure in the country.
