N125bn Required For Road Maintenance – FERMA Boss

The amount required for the maintenance of federal roads in Nigeria annually is N125bn, and not N36bn as allocated for capital budget in the 2020 appropriation bill, the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency said on Tuesday.

According to FERMA, the capital releases to the agency has been inadequate but despite this, about 5,000km of federal roads were fixed and maintained by the organisation in 2019.

The Managing Director of FERMA, Nuruddeen Rafindadi, said this while playing host to the Senate Committee on FERMA led by its Chairman, Senator Gershom Bassey.

Rafindadi said, “Ideally, we would require N125bn every year to maintain all the federal roads as much as we would want to maintain them.

“If you consider the asset value of roads and bridges across the country, that is a modest sum to try to preserve the value of your asset.

“Poor funding has affected our performance negatively in the sense that we are not in the best position to do what we would have wanted to do.”

He added, “We also monitor closely when we are planning, we monitor after interventions are done just to ensure where we can improve and if there was any shortfall in the performance and following of procedures.”

The FERMA boss said the agency had been taking its concerns to the National Assembly, adding that there had been huge backlog with respect to interventions needed on many federal roads.