US $13m has been approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) of Nigeria for the Benin-Adumagbae-Igba-Akure road in Edo and Ondo State.
Minister of State for Works and Housing, Abubakar Aliyu confirmed the report and explained that works had stopped due to lack of funding. He affirmed that the contract has been reviewed and the contractor will resume works.
“We have inherited the project and reviewed the contract from the original sum of US $10m inclusive of VAT and tax, an increase of about US $4m. It was then further reviewed down through the processes of going to BPP to the total sum of US $13m,” said Abubakar Aliyu.
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Road network in Nigeria
Nigeria has the largest road network in West Africa and the second largest south of the Sahara, with roughly 108,000 km of surfaced roads in 1990. However they are poorly maintained and are often cited as a cause for the country’s high rate of road fatalities.
The government has however begun to repair the country’s poorly maintained road network. Because Nigeria’s railways are in a perilous condition, the government is trying to rectify the situation by privatizing the Nigerian Railway Corporation.
In 2004 Nigeria’s Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) began to patch the 32,000 kilometre federal roads network, and in 2005 FERMA initiated a more substantial rehabilitation. The rainy season and poor equipment pose challenges to road maintenance.[
Similarly, the government is pursuing a strategy of partial port privatization by granting concessions to private port operators so that they can improve the quality of port facilities and operations.
