The President Muhammadu Buhari government in Nigeria is reconstructing and rehabilitating 13,000km of roads out of the 35,000km of Federal roads.
A group in Nigeria’s governing party, the All Progressives Congress, APC Legacy Awareness and Campaign group said this in a press statement.
The statement was signed by its leaders; the APC National Youths leader, Ismael Ahmed, Director General of the Progressive Governors Forum, PGF Salihu Lukman, a former APC National Publicity Secretary Mr. Lanre Issa-Onilu and a presidential media aide Tolu Ogunlesi.
The APC group said that since 2015, President Buhari Administration has dedicated significant resources into funding road projects and ensuring the resumption of work on abandoned projects.
According to the group, the results can be seen in abandoned projects from previous administrations that are being worked on and completed.
“Work has since resumed on several stalled, abandoned or solution-defying road projects that were inherited, like the Loko-Oweto Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Sagamu-Benin Expressway, the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, Onitsha-Enugu Expressway, Kano-Maiduguri Expressway, Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway, Obajana-Kabba Road, Ilorin-Jebba Road, Apapa-Oshodi-Oworonshoki Road, and several others are in progress, with some already close to completion.
“A brand new bridge in Ikom, Cross River State, has just been completed, to replace a dilapidated steel truss bridge originally built five decades ago, as has a new border bridge linking Nigeria and Cameroon, in the spirit of regional integration.
“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. In 2017, construction finally commenced on the Bodo-Bonny Bridges and Road (linking Bonny Island to the Rivers Mainland), a project first mooted decades ago, and awarded a number of times without success, prior to the Buhari Administration” the statement read.
The APC group stated that the government has also broken the financing jinx for large-scale infrastructure projects, by implanting innovative methods to finance construction projects.
“Setting up the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF), in 2018, with $650m in seed funding.
“Deploying and executing Presidential Executive Order 7, the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme.
“Launching the Highway Development and Maintenance Initiative (HDMI).
“Approving the establishment of a multi-billion dollar Infrastructure Corporation, InfraCorp, to mobilize and deploy funds towards viable, transformational infrastructure projects.
“Issuance of Sovereign Sukuk Bonds (the first in the country’s history) dedicated to road infrastructure.
“Approving the National Public Buildings Maintenance Policy, the first in the country, to create an economy out of infrastructure maintenance” the group said.
According to the APC group, President Buhari’s infrastructure vision is a carryover of the groundbreaking legacy of his days in charge of the Petroleum Trust Fund, which it described as one of the most impactful infrastructure interventions ever seen in Nigeria between Independence and the start of the fourth Republic.
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