Rad1cal:


so rehabilitating dead roads doesnt amount to construction. God have mercy

bokohalal:

It does not.

Reptyle:


I give you "rehabilitating dead roads."

Now, plus rehabilitation, reconstructions and construction, HOW MANY KILOMETERS OF ROADS HAS THIS GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY DONE

justme002:
Why not get a measuring tape and mayb a ruler and start going from state to state to measure the lengths n breadths of all the roads he has constructed!!,am certain u ain't no doubting Thomas but if u doubt this one then it simply means u reside just in lagos and have neva traveled out of there before..

Rad1cal:


Really, so when counting constructed road networks in Nigeria you will avoid mentioning the Benin ore road

saintkash:



if it does then wat stops u and gej from using d word "rehabilitated" instead of "constructed".
thief should be called a thief and ole be called "ole". gej-2015

bokohalal:

Bros, there is a difference between REHABILITATED and CONSTRUCTED.

Rad1cal:

Rehabiitating roads involve construction, rehabilitation goes beyond patching potholes . the Benin Ore road was rehabilitated.
Fashola in Lagos has claimed contructing over 300km of roads which involves over 95% of rehabilitation. How many new roads did he construct ?

bokohalal:

Bros, there is a difference between REHABILITATED and CONSTRUCTED.

Delafruita:
am not talking in terms of a specific road.i mean the lenght been quoted.has GEJ constructed 25,000km of roads?benin-ore road is less than 150km and only the first phase of 70km has been constructed.he'd have contructed 250 of same road to lay claim to 25,000km.besides,the minister for works remarked in november 2014 that 61 roads had either been constructed or undergoin construction since 2011.how then was the 25,000km figure arrived at?

Rad1cal:


havent you perused the link i provided here ?

Rad1cal:


Rehabiitating roads involve construction, rehabilitation goes beyond patching potholes . the Benin Ore road was rehabilitated.





Fashola in Lagos has claimed contructing over 300km of roads which involves over 95% of rehabilitation. How many new roads did he construct ?

cooljude:
2008, i could remember Onitsha and Owerri road but today it is clearly different. Initially before now if you wanted to travel to Nsukka from Onitsha, you have to go through Night mile but now you could go through Umuneri through Uzo-uwani local goverment then to Nsukka. Quite a shorter route. You don't know this stuffs probably because you don't travel wide. From what i have seen i am certain that in the aspect of transportation this administeration has been improving things but i want them to improve more.

Reptyle:


I have sir.

The link actually pointed me to a presentation on the power sector reforms.

But there was another slide deck by the Ministry of Works on road projects in 2012.

Do you have a more recent presentation to share?

That would help us verify the statistics.

Immune1:


So are you now suggesting that old roads that were constructed as far back as the days of Gowon and have been forgotten by successive governments before now should be allowed to rot further? Do you even know the history of Lagos-Ibadan,Lagos-Benin and Abuja-lokoja that Obasanjo literally messed up?. After Gowon, GEJ has built the best quality of roads ever in Nigeria and the revival of the railway system will ensure these roads last even longer..........if u wanna still wallow in deceit and denial just keep believing Jonathan hasn't done anything.......i really don't have any words for you......whether you like it or not GEJ is winning this elections. So better start licking your wounds already!!!

Delafruita:
exactly.the total number of paved roads including federal,state and local govt roads is less than 100,000km.i havent heard of the GEJ administration starting a road from scratch.what GEJ campainers inadvertently tell us is that GEJ has constructed or reconstructed 25% of all the paved roads in nigeria.they definitely wont need to advertise that

Rad1cal:


so rehabilitating dead roads doesnt amount to construction. God have mercy

Rad1cal:


Rehabiitating roads involve construction, rehabilitation goes beyond patching potholes . the Benin Ore road was rehabilitated.





Fashola in Lagos has claimed contructing over 300km of roads which involves over 95% of rehabilitation. How many new roads did he construct ?

bokohalal:


Make, create, build = construction.

Leave Fashola alone for for now as we are talking about the phantom 25,000 kilometres of road CONSTRUCTED by Goodluck Jonathan.

Change2015:


I do not believe the claim, but any reasonable person will understand that unless the bulk of freight haulage goes by rail instead of road, those roads will still decay as we have seen time and time again. So far, there has been no meaningful decrease in the haulage of goods by road.

#change
#GMB
#APC

‘Africa Check’ Dismisses Jonathan Claim of 25,000 Motorable Roads

Africa Check, a non-partisan organization which promotes accuracy in public debate and the media, has debunked a recent assertion by President Goodluck Jonathan that under his watch, most of Nigeria’s roads have become “motorable,” saying the claim lacks evidence.


A Nigerian highway in deplorable condition Africa Check.org

“When I assumed office in 2010, out of the 35,000km of federal roads nationwide, only about 5,000km were motorable, Jonathan said as he formally declared on 11 November that he would seek another term of office. “Today, that number has increased to about 25,000km.”

Using information from various sources, including Budgit, a Lagos-based start-up which tracks government spending, Africa Check said that there is some evidence of success in revamping road infrastructure, particularly in the Abuja area, the claim is an overkill in terms of the amount and quality of the work undertaken.

“While there have been some road improvements (particularly in advance of elections, as the government seeks to win votes), there is no exhaustive proof to corroborate the president’s assertion,” Africa Check said. “It would appear that the claims are exaggerated.”

A key part of the enquiry is the atrocious quality of most of the roads even when they are broadcast as completed or revamped, and the government appears headed for a cul-de-sac trying to explain to voters how many death-traps can be called motorable roads.

It would also be recalled that last week, various observers pointed out that some of the claims of achievement or “transformation” being claimed by the federal government to boost President Jonathan’s electoral chances are actually state projects. Critics point out that Mr. Jonathan has barely addressed any of the promises he made in the 2011 electoral campaign.

Delafruita:
fashola's claim was correct because fashola was referring to inner city roads which are mostly constructed with interlockin stones.those roads where constructed from scratch and created as alternative routes to major routes.examples include the aggboroko-igbo-elerin road which enables drivers bypass traffic at iyana-iba and okokomaiko when connecting from lasu-iba expressway to badagry expressway.another bypass on that same route is from iyana-school to anibaba-iyana-isashi which achieves same purpose while another on that same route is from iba jumction to aratumi to anibaba-iyana-isashi which also achieves same purpose.another currently under construction is from ipaiye to inner aratumi to iyana-isashi.all those listed routes achieve same purpose of been alternative routes and they were all constructed from scratch and thats just from one route.i can list many others like that

Rad1cal:


Why should we leave Fasola alone when he hypocritically critique the FG on this regard.

Rad1cal:


Why should we leave Fasola alone when he hypocritically critique the FG on this regard.

Are the majority of Nigeria’s roads now ‘motorable’?

Nigeria’s president has claimed that “motorable” roads have increased five-fold since 2010. There is little evidence to support his claim.



Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan recently announced his second term bid and made several claims about his government’s achievements, including improvements to road networks in the country.

“When I assumed office in 2010, out of the 35,000km of federal roads nationwide, only about 5,000km were motorable, Jonathan said on 11 November. “Today, that number has increased to about 25,000km.”

That assertion seemed extreme, given the notoriously potholed state of Nigerian roads, so Africa Check investigated, and found that there was little evidence to support the claim.

This isn’t the first such claim

Jonathan’s words echo comments made several times in recent months by the Federal Ministry of Works, which oversees roads owned by the government.

In July the Punch newspaper quoted the minister of Works, Mike Onolememen, as saying that 71% of federal roads are now motorable.

Speaking at a meeting of the National Council of Works in October the minister repeated the claim, saying: “From about 4,500km of fair roads in 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has revamped the kilometers of good roads to more than 25,000.” He estimated the cost of the repairs at 1.765trn naira – around $9.6bn.

One week before the presidential declaration, he repeated the claim, saying: “Over 70% of our road network is now motorable when compared to about 16% at the inception of this administration.”



There is little evidence to support it

Corroborating this is difficult. Of the government agencies involved in initiating road works, the Federal Ministry of Works provides the most detail. Examples include these speeches by the minister, in May 2014 and September 2014. Included in those are lists of some of the federal government’s road projects between 2011 and 2014.

But there is no government document that exhaustively outlines federal road projects in Nigeria, says Stanley Achonu, operations lead at Budgit, a Lagos-based start-up that tracks government spending.

Budgit has found it “difficult” to track the 25,000km of claims, he says. The available evidence “doesn’t add up to 25,000km.

At the same time, Nigerians do not seem to be particularly happy with the state of their roads. A 2013 snap poll by NOIPolls, a Gallup-affiliated agency, showed that 7 out of every 10 Nigerians consider them “unsafe”.


Motorists, motorcyclists and tuk-tuks navigate the Ikorodu-Shagamu road at Ogijo in Ogun State on October 23, 2014. Photo: AFP/Pius Utomi Ekpei

The government is playing with words

Achonu also points out that there’s a semantics issue at work in the way government officials refer to road works, allowing for generous interpretations of their work.

The descriptions of the work in the minister’s speeches range from “maintenance” to “rehabilitation” to “dualisation.” Which raises obvious questions. What does it mean for a road to be “maintained”?

And, as Achonu queries, if the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) fills a handful of potholes on the 120km stretch of road that is the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, does that mean the entire road is then added to the catalogue of roads rendered “motorable”?

Even the president’s concept of “motorable” is a loose one. As the World Bank points out in this 2009 document there is no single agreed definition. According to Dr Adewole Oladele, a Nigerian academic who is currently the project manager of the Transportation Technology Transfer Unit at the University of Botswana, a motorable road is “accessible by a vehicle, safe, with comfort and no obstruction.” Such a road wouldn’t necessarily have to be paved, Oladele said.

But some improvements are evident

That’s not to say there isn’t some evidence of success in revamping road infrastructure. Achonu says this is especially visible in Abuja, the capital, where Budgit is tracking a number of large-scale road projects.

Apart from the Federal Ministry of Works (which oversees FERMA), there are a number of government agencies investing independently in road projects: the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (set up by President Jonathan in 2012 to invest the savings from the partial removal of petrol subsidies), and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), which invests in infrastructure projects in the oil-rich Delta region.

There is also a special intervention project – the Nigerian Federal Roads Development Project – to which the World Bank is committing $330m with the aim of cutting “passenger travel times, vehicle operating costs and traffic related fatalities.”


Federal Roads Maintenance Agency workers clear a gutter on Apapa Oshodi expressway that leads to West Africa’s busiest and largest container terminal. Photo: AFP/Pius Utomi Ekpei

Conclusion: Little evidence to support Jonathan’s claims

While there have been some road improvements (particularly in advance of elections, as the government seeks to win votes), there is no exhaustive proof to corroborate the president’s assertion. It would appear that the claims are exaggerated.

shiningshina:


What?!! Are you saying that "rehabilitation" and "construction" mean the same thing?!

martin98:

The reason why people won't believe the road construction claims is because the way the state and local government abadon their own portion of roads. Most people dont travel around the country and when they travel or move, they mainly access the state and local government roads.
You would testify to the fact that the state of our Federal roads are better under GEJ. And we know it is all over the country. If I may ask, what is the land mass of this country? Is it that the road capacity in Nigeria is not more than 25000km? Since people in every state in the country would testify to the improvement in the condition of Federal Government roads, why is it hard to believe or are you doubting the fact that Nigeria has over 25000km of Federal roads?
I just wonder why some people would always claim GEJ has done nothing. Many have been brainwashed. Many believe this government has done nothing. And when you state the things they have done, they wouldn't want to believe and some would attack you and some would even abuse or cause you. Hence, the need to advertise. The need to make people see things are different from what they have heard.
I believe something, "people will always question the good things they see about you, but will always believe the bad things they hear about you".

Reptyle:


But going by the discussions on this thread, no one has been able to state for a fact that this government has constructed or even rehabilitated 25,000km of roads across the country.

The link you posted for instance points to a presentation on the power sector reforms and most other respondents have only reacted emotionally with no attempt at concrete proof.

See why a Fashola would speak the way he did?