The pre-interview engagement was though short, it however gave some inkling it would be an incisive interaction, of course, with the Minister of Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, SAN. The confidence was one; speaking stricto sensu to the issues was another. His takes about public concerns have always been different and that’s what many believe, distinguishes him from the lot. From his stout defence of the Muhammadu Buhari administration to clearing the air of misgivings about his ministry and the need to start focusing on the states for “real developments” that directly affect the people, Fashola, in this two-hour interview with THISDAY, held his grounds for the stretch, but mindful of the challenges of the administration and what might have led them thus far. Excerpts:


As governor, your brand equity was very high and there was this consensus that you were the poster boy of your party then. Can you Compare your tenure as governor, which earned you accolades across board and the offices you’ve held afterwards, because people feel that at the federal level, you have not particularly done well, compared to your track record in Lagos? What is the challenge?

One thing you must accept is that the longer you stay in public office, the more enemies you make. Oftentimes, you see that the longer politicians or public servants last in public positions, staying popular becomes a very difficult thing. If we use numbers seriously, you will see that the honeymoon period that births a new leadership and popularity that comes with it, wanes as you begin to take decisions that affect the people’s lives.


Then the temptation to compare Lagos and Nigeria as alluring as it is, is not smart. 3000sq kilometres? I can cover it in two to three days – from Epe to Badagry to Ikorodu. But, even that, its nooks and crannies are still difficult to reach. Compare it with over 900,000 kilometres . Don’t also forget that as an appointed person, you have delegated authority and it’s different from being an elected person. And then, more importantly, the economic seasons have changed.

I was also governor at a time when we had some revenue windfalls from oil, which was trading at about $100 per barrel at that time, and we used our own little share of the allocations from the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) and we were also very aggressive with our Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). We also contracted debt against our IGR. So, the comparisons are not apposite; they are night and day. That said, of course, at this level, people expect certain things to happen. Then, of course, what were the longest routes in Lagos?


They were Lagos-Badagry, sixty-something kilometres; Ikorodu to Epe, sixty-something or forty-something kilometres, then, LASU-Iba road, about 27 kilometres. But here, we are dealing with four hundred and something kilometres from Tambuwal to Yauri to Kontagora and you are dealing with 570 kilometres from Maiduguri to Kano or 127 kilometres from Lagos to Ibadan and so on.

So, the dynamics are just different and then, of course, in parliament, you have 40 House of Assembly members to negotiate with, but you have 360 House of Representatives members to negotiate with here; you have109 senators.


Is that to say that the work is overwhelming at the federal level?

Again, I think it’s important to understand the role that a minister plays. With all thanks to those that once did a good job, as I always say, I do not take all the credit for what happened in Lagos. If I did, many people would say, no, I had a role to play. So, I must acknowledge them. All I can take responsibility for is what we didn’t do well. I will tell you, because I was the team leader. So, I think that we’ve acquitted ourselves very well. In spite of the fact that we can’t finish the work that Nigeria needs to do in one administration.


That’s the bottom line. If you look across the country today, roads that had become dormant, where contractors have moved away, we literally brought them back. Now, the real challenge is the construction time and the revenue challenges and governance is becoming more complex contrary to what people know. Using roads as a metaphor for discussion, I don’t know if people know that we have to enumerate communities to pay compensation before we can pass? I was in Akwanga in Nasarawa recently and those are some of the issues.


We have a post-assessment, post-visit report and the different departments involved. People don’t see that; they just want to see a road and I understand that. So, we just came back from Bauchi. The national council assessed some roads under construction and also our housing project. So recently, I was in Oyo State, from Ibadan and drove through Lagos, stopped at Lotto junction on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. Now, we need to acquire massive land to construct the interchange; people have to move.

I can’t do that because as a minister, I don’t control land. So, I had to appeal to Governor Dapo Abiodun to meet me there, because under the land use act, he has responsibility over land. These are the exchanges that ultimately define when the result will come. The contractor is there and this is a road that is substantially well funded. Now, we have peoples’ issues. I was just reading a report from Governor Kayode Fayemi on environmental impact assessment for 46 kilometres for Ado-Akure road. The people in Ado-Ekiti can’t be bothered by this report. They just want to see a road. Before we can raise money, we have to enumerate all the communities there.


These are now the global governance standards for funding and this is the hallmark of democracy, getting people involved, even animal life, climatic conditions, we have to go through all that checklist. So, you have an environmental impact assessment that’s about 46 pages. People don’t know that this is going on. So we may look to them, to be slow but these are the hurdles we have to cross before we can get to the final place, where the rubber meets the road and where they like us to be. We want to be there, like yesterday.


But as governor, peoples’ issues were also there or weren’t they?

Yes, I was their governor. I was the one elected by them. Let us take another example. We had compensation issues on the Lekki Free Zone, when the Dangote group bought the land. It took one or two meetings and we resolved it. So, here in some places, we need to call some senators to go beg their people and to the benefit of some of them, we are seeing some results. I’m just giving you examples. I’m not giving you excuses. I’m giving you real life situations that we deal with.


Two days ago, I was talking to the Governor of Bayelsa, we have had extended correspondences and he was telling me that they’ve made progress for us in terms of compensation so that we could finish the Yenagoa-Otuoke-Kolo road, because it was stalled by compensation issues. So, this is going on across the country. That’s just one problem. In some other places, contractors can’t blast, because they don’t have access to dynamite to be able to blast the rock for quarry and that is a controlled substance even before we had these security challenges.


Now, it is even more controlled. So, again, people don’t know that I have to write to the National Security Adviser to say exempt these people and he has to exercise his own independent judgment to decide whether or not to approve. In some places, where they could get quarry to do their work, within 50 kilometres of the site; if that is a high-risk zone for blasting, they have to go as far as 400 kilometres. So, these are some of the things we are dealing with. We are also dealing with the realities of the economy. Some of these projects, many of them were inherited. So, they were awarded as far back as 2000. For instance, Lagos to Ota to Abeokuta was awarded in 2000. By the time I became minister, the contractor had left the site.


They were not funded. But during that period, we went to pay $12 billion for debt forgiveness. That’s a policy choice. By the time I became a minister, the rate had changed, so we had to renegotiate and re-award the contract. Now, it’s a N56 billion contract, but how much is in the budget? I don’t make the budget. We propose and what comes out finally is by the other arm of government, that’s what the constitution says. So, we have over N100 million for a N56 billion contract. Once the contractor sees that, the enthusiasm dies. We have managed to get some Sukuk funds of about N4 billion now. That has been spent, so the man is waiting.


Recently, you announced plans to re-introduce tolling on some federal roads. How far has the ministry gone with this plan? As a follow-up, during Obasanjo’s time when they abolished tolling, the government said then that tolling was already factored into the price of petrol we buy in filling stations. That there was no point charging another. So does this not amount to double taxation?

Let me start from the last one. In the series of exchanges that we’ve had because the purported income in lieu of toll was to have accrued to the Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA), the agency has tried to operationalise that provision in the Act. We have asked the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and they have said there’s no such provision in their pricing template.


So, what it simply means is that at the time they were making all of these noises, what ought to have been done had not been done. We took up this matter last Thursday at the National Council on Works in Bauchi and I made it clear to all the commissioners from the states that look, NNPC has said this thing is not in our template. Which one of you is ready to step forward and go and impose that levy on the people in your state and everybody said, “This is a dead horse; let’s leave it. No need to flog it.” It is different from a toll fee, which is a user charge, because if you don’t use it, you don’t pay. We need to separate the two.


Now, yes, when we did a tolling policy and announced it, it caught a lot of attention. But the tolling policy is only a very small part of what we wanted to do. What we want to do actually is to see if we can really entice the private sector to take over some of our major highways. You know, oftentimes, we hear this PPP, and it looks easy and it sometimes appears to people on the outside that we don’t seem to know what we’re doing. But I am always quick to remind them that many of us in government today came from that sector, so we know that there’s no magic wand there.


But we know that some people can do some things if we put some things right. So, we launched a programme called the Highway Development Management Initiative (HDMI). That’s the programme. We have gazetted the entire Right-of-Way on 24 routes spread across the six geo-political zones. But we think 24 is heavy and the appetite and capacity of the private sector is limited and therefore, we said let’s do it in two phases and so, we started with 12 and in specifics, we issued a request. We issued a request for pre-qualification and we had 75 applicants and we have pre-qualified 18 companies.


Now, they can’t go about making financial proposals without a tolling policy, which will define for them what kind of vehicles can be tolled and what are the tolling rates. So, that was also a work-in-progress at the time. And where we are right now is that policy is now out with classified vehicles from six axle trucks, flat trucks to heavy duty buses, to light bosses to Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) to private cars and commercial vehicles – all of those are liable to pay tolls.


We have, as a matter of policy, said tricycles, bicycles, motorcycles, diplomatic and military and police and related stuff – ambulances – will be exempt from it. So, we think that those pre-qualified companies now will have a basis to now make plans. But, beyond tolls, there are other services around a highway that really for some time have been like unoccupied spaces if you like – advertising, trading on the highway. When you’re going to Benin-Ore or anywhere you are buying something by the roadside, all of these things can be organised into much more prolific businesses.


So, the concessionaire, who ultimately wins this, is the person we think can do these things. Then ambulance services, weigh bridge, vehicle towing services and so on and so forth. This is the kind of governance we expect, but the tolling is just a small part of it. Our highway is just about 45.7 metres from the centre line on each side, so we have about 100 metres and that is a space that can be put to very prolific use.

In December 2019, you told Nigerians that you were building 500 roads across the country. This is 2021, how many have you completed and inaugurated and what is the state of others?


Let me first explain to you, when you say inaugurate, how do you inaugurate a 500 kilometres road and at what end? You are comparing us to a state, where we build a 2-kilometre road, you will go and cut tape. It’s not the same.

Does it mean you now better appreciate the challenges of those you criticised when you were not a part of the federal government?

I criticised them not for not inaugurating roads, but for not building them. Things are relative. At a time, given what we know, the policies they pursued were different from the ones I would have pursued. For example, if I had $12 billion at the time, I would not have paid creditors; I would have invested it in my country’s economy, because what was the point of paying creditors only to borrow back? At that same time, UAE, Angola, and other oil-rich states invested the same resources.


Then, what did we do when the next windfall came after we paid the debt? By the time it came, Dubai had built a super-efficient airline, a functional city. What were the policy decisions then? The policy decisions were that, no, we don’t want to hurt the people. Keep the dollar at N120. Use oil resources to support consumption, exchange rate, and where was the money going? Shopping in Dubai mall. It’s all gone now.

Those were the things we criticised. You can use your revenues and your resources to do two things: defend your economy or defend your exchange rate. I will use it to defend my economy. So, I can point to what we did in Lagos with that prolific oil resource and our borrowings. You will see the Lekki bridge, you will see seven kilometres of rail, you will see road infrastructure. That’s investment when extraordinary income comes. That didn’t mean we were not borrowing, but as those things were kicking into life, each time you crossed that bridge, we were saving you 30 minutes from the other route. Time saved is money and we will accrue it back in taxes.


Property values went up, we saw land use charges coming back. So, those were the things I criticised. You see, I never believed and I don’t expect that the president should be inaugurating roads, that’s my own view and I’ve shared this view with President Buhari. Just penultimate week, I went to meet him and I showed him Obudu-Vandekier road, I showed him Sokoto to Kontagora, I showed him sections two and three of Kano-Maiduguri,which has almost 300 kilometres of completed, marked roads. So, I said look, I was recommending to him to allow me nominate my colleagues in the cabinet from those states just to go and do the ceremonial, because it seems as if some people will not believe that it’s finished, until we have that ceremony. But I am clear in my mind that the people, who are driving on that road know that it is completed and in December, we did a survey where people were moving – going home for Christmas or returning after, and the word that came back was that this place has been completed, they know.


So, those are some of the roads that have been completed, you see me going round the bridges that have been completed: the Loko-Oweto bridge, we finished the bridge; we have finished the road to Oshogbedo to Oweto, but the part that we have not finished is the Nassarawa-Loko link road of about 74 kilometres. That was the one you might have heard about two weeks ago. We asked FEC to allow us to limit the contract to just 10km for the main contractor, because it’s slow, so that the two other contractors, who have finished their own, can take up the remaining part of the 74km, which was approved.


But people are already driving through it because it saves you the journey from Otukpo to Abuja, which would have been six hours to three hours. You cut off Lafia completely and land in Keffi. The bridge to Cameroon is finished; the bridge to Ikom is finished; Kano-Maiduguri too. Where does the president want to stand in Maiduguri to talk to the people of Kano? So, what we’re trying to do now is to get the minister from Kano to deal with his section, the minister from Bauchi to deal with his own, minister from Yobe to deal with his side. There’s one that passes through Sambisa and it’s the one that’s most challenging.


And these now have fibre optics. Katsina Ala/Ogoja, Tambuwal, Sokoto, Niger, up to Yauri, there’s Uduma in Enugu State, linking Ebonyi, this is 40 kilometres. Just to make sense, on Lagos-Ibadan for example, when we are constructing, we don’t construct 100 kilometres at once. Sometimes, there’s a place where you have to relocate pipes. You have to relocate cables, gas lines, so we’ll close five kilometres. So, we can close this section and divert everybody to the other side. And when we finish the 5 kilometres, do you want us to come and inaugurate it?


So, across the aggregate of Lagos-Ibadan for example, we have done a cumulative of about 38 kilometres on section one before Shagamu and the total of that is 44km. We have done about 50 kilometres on the Ibadan bound, which is eighty-something, so we are almost 90 kilometres now, out of 127 kilometres and that’s why the journey time is reducing. But if you want us every 5 kilometres to come and then cut tape, of course, that will cause more traffic when we come.


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