₦airaland Forum

BOSSkesh:
Imagine the amount that was spent on this project
Only for it to lay in waste and ruins
Nigeria needs to seriously wake up
And we even borrowed money to execute this project smh can you just imagine

Jeezuzpick:
Who takes train to Abuja airport?

Why leave my house and take an Über to the train station, then take a train to the airport when I can take the Über straight to the airport?

Why will I arrive from Lagos or overseas and start boarding train to a station, only to start looking for another vehicle to take me to my destination, when I can take a car straight there?
These people in government don't know how to source for data to use in developing infrastructure.

To please the people, first find out what the people want.

ezugegere:
Everything under APC is a scam. I mean everything!

Hollyharjii:
One thing is to build while another thing, which is paramount is the maintenance...

property123:
Buhari and APC's incompetence knows no bounds.

1Alex:
Ok

Lovelyn451:
When a northerner is in power

sulaak:
The problem is building the wrong infrastructure. A railway that doesn't link the municipal centre is a wasted investment and adds no value to Nigeria. Had the investment been used to complete the Ibadan to Kano Standard Guage Railway it would have improved production and reduced the cost of food distribution.

Jeezuzpick:
Who takes train to Abuja airport?

Why leave my house and take an Über to the train station, then take a train to the airport when I can take the Über straight to the airport?

Why will I arrive from Lagos or overseas and start boarding train to a station, only to start looking for another vehicle to take me to my destination, when I can take a car straight there?

These people in government don't know how to source for data to use in developing infrastructure.

To please the people, first find out what the people want.

brownroofpipuar:
Same thing goes with the Obudu Protea Hotel and Ranch Resort.
The APC rule to destroy system of government just destroyed that beautiful heaven, the cable cars dead, the Obudu international mountain race that brings in thousands of tourist to the country is no more, Protea has left, the cows all dead, honey mill dead, presidential reserve area covered with thick forest. All died under the government of Ben Ayade who is from same Obubu. APC is pure witchcraft

Nigeria’s Train to Nowhere Shows How Not to Build Public Transit
A light rail system in the capital shut down after less than two years in service.

By William Clowes
29 August 2023 at 05:01 BST


In July 2018, Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria at the time, boarded a gleaming new train linking the capital city, Abuja, with its airport. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Buhari hailed the system as “evidence that we are a government that delivers on its promises.”

Five years on, that promise looks empty. Train cars are locked away at a depot. Cavernous stations fully equipped with escalators, ticket offices, cameras and scanners stand empty, overseen by bored security guards. The faux leather couches in the VIP area are covered in bird and bat droppings. “It’s an abandoned project,” says Rowland Ataguba, an adviser to the government on rail strategy. “Quite clearly there was no plan on how to run the operations before they built it.”

The $823 million Abuja Light Rail—the first of its kind in West Africa—was closed in March 2020, ostensibly to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Since then, it’s remained shuttered, and there’s been scant progress toward a resumption of service on the 27-kilometer (17-mile) line. Meanwhile, Nigeria is spending $50 million a year paying down the project’s $500 million in loans from the Export-Import Bank of China. “The current situation is a mystery for the next minister to unravel,” says Nasir El-Rufai, who as minister in charge of the capital area signed the contract to build the railway 16 years ago. What do you expect from EL-Rufai ?

The idea was to reduce congestion, helping the city avoid the polluted, traffic-clogged fate of the country’s commercial hub, Lagos—the capital until Abuja, a city newly carved out of the savannah in central Nigeria, opened for business in 1991. From the time planning started in the 1970s, Abuja was always meant to have urban rail, but it wasn’t until 2007 that China Civil Engineering Construction Corp. won the contract for the first leg, and it took another half-decade for the government to secure sufficient funding.

“The line basically avoided where people are, where people live, where people go”

The line was intended to be the first of a half dozen in a 290-kilometer network that would connect the city to the satellite towns where many workers live. Instead, it’s become a lesson in how not to create a mass transit system, says Mohamed Lawal Shaibu of Envicons Teams Ltd., an urban planning consultant in Abuja. The problem, Shaibu says, is that the train serves areas with little demand. “It has been very terribly executed,” he says. “The line basically avoided where people are, where people live, where people go.”

At one end lies the airport, a place where most people who can afford to fly typically arrive by car. At the other end is an isolated area of the so-called Central Business District, where the road in front of the station is more often filled with herders driving cattle to grazing land than anyone headed to or from work. Out back is scrubland where people fleeing violence in the north of the country have built shacks. An additional 18 kilometers of track was built toward the suburbs but never saw any service.

The first section was conceived about two decades ago as an airport link to bolster the capital’s bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. But after Abuja lost out to Glasgow, local officials stuck with the plan rather than adapting it to create a system that might better serve residents, according to Tonami Playman, an independent researcher who studies African public transport. “Politicians just want something to ribbon-cut and don’t care what kind of utility the infrastructure will provide,” he says.

During the 20 months the line was open, a maximum of four trains a day made the 40-minute trip between the city and the airport in each direction, making just one stop in between while breezing through five other stations. The system failed because it was “neither a high occupancy nor a high frequency service,” according to a report prepared for Japan’s development agency in 2019, which estimated daily ridership at fewer than 1,000 passengers, compared with a forecast of 34,000.

Mohammed Bello, the minister who ran the capital area under Buhari, said in October that he was working “toward the imminent resumption of operations.” That didn’t happen. Bello left his post in May when Buhari retired, and the newly elected president, Bola Tinubu, waited until Aug. 16 to name a successor. Neither Tinubu’s office nor the capital administration replied to questions about the railway.

The new minister in charge of the capital region, Nyesom Wike, on Aug. 23 toured the line and vowed that trains would be back on track within eight months. And the city has signed a $6.6 million deal with the Chinese construction company to complete repairs. The project’s defenders say once the system starts running at full throttle—whenever that might be—it will boost development along the route, and starting with a line through more densely populated areas would have been more expensive.

The main reason for the ongoing closure is damage suffered during the shutdown, according to the state-owned company appointed to run the system in May. A project manager involved in the railway says thieves have stolen crucial equipment such as communications cables, copper wiring and signaling gear, and repairing or replacing that will take at least six months once work begins.

The plan is to integrate the train with a revamped public bus service that will ferry passengers from stations to their final destinations. Until then, though, the 3.8 million residents of the fast-growing city, and millions more who live nearby, are left with few options beyond the thousands of rickety shared taxis and minibuses that ply the streets and highways.

Nigeria is notorious for grand infrastructure projects that are ill-conceived, never completed or quickly abandoned. The Ajaokuta steel mill, for instance, has swallowed $7 billion since the 1970s without ever producing a sheet, rod or coil. The government has committed billions of dollars to restoring four oil refineries that have barely produced any fuel in more than a decade. And just a couple of miles from the train’s city terminus, the 170-meter-tall Millennium Tower—intended to be a cultural complex topped with a revolving restaurant—remains unfinished 17 years after construction began.

Any significant further investment in the rail project in the near term, either providing the needed subsidies for the existing line or constructing the next one, remains unlikely. Nigeria’s government spent almost all its revenue last year on debt service, and going back to Chinese lenders is getting increasingly difficult, as the government and banks there become less generous in the face of growing domestic challenges. Six years ago the Abuja administration awarded China Civil Engineering a $1.5 billion deal to build the second phase of the train system, intended to serve busier areas, but adequate funding has yet to be lined up, leaving the project in deep freeze. “Signing a contract is one thing,” says Najeeb Abdussalam, head of the city’s public transit agency. “Raising the money is another.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-29/nigeria-s-failed-train-shows-how-not-to-build-public-transit?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid

Jeezuzpick:
Who takes train to Abuja airport?

Why leave my house and take an Über to the train station, then take a train to the airport when I can take the Über straight to the airport?

Why will I arrive from Lagos or overseas and start boarding train to a station, only to start looking for another vehicle to take me to my destination, when I can take a car straight there?

These people in government don't know how to source for data to use in developing infrastructure.

To please the people, first find out what the people want.

Jeezuzpick:
Who takes train to Abuja airport?

Why leave my house and take an Über to the train station, then take a train to the airport when I can take the Über straight to the airport?

Why will I arrive from Lagos or overseas and start boarding train to a station, only to start looking for another vehicle to take me to my destination, when I can take a car straight there?

These people in government don't know how to source for data to use in developing infrastructure.

To please the people, first find out what the people want.

Onewazobia:
Oga, it's not all about APC rather a rotten system.
An organisation of criminals disguising as politicians (all the parties). Although, Bubu was wost of hhem well, the present Gov. are not different either

garfield1:
Pdp that started it nko

garfield1:
It's destruction started under imoke and by the time ayade joined apc,it was dead.so rephrase,pdp govt is evil,purely demonic and worse than apc

Hollyharjii:
One thing is to build while another thing, which is paramount is the maintenance...

Jeezuzpick:
Who takes train to Abuja airport?

Why leave my house and take an Über to the train station, then take a train to the airport when I can take the Über straight to the airport?

Why will I arrive from Lagos or overseas and start boarding train to a station, only to start looking for another vehicle to take me to my destination, when I can take a car straight there?

These people in government don't know how to source for data to use in developing infrastructure.

To please the people, first find out what the people want.

LOVEALAIGBO:
Most enlightening post of the thread!

They see other countries major cities airports being served by rail, and they rush to replicate such in Nigeria without thinking! The entire transportation system in these countries are highly efficient, clean, comfortable, can connect you to other rail stations all over the city and country and are integrated with other forms of transportation like buses, trams, taxis, ferries and even other airports!

Why get off a plane only to enter train that will dump you one or two stops in the middle of the city or far away from your final destination!?

brownroofpipuar:
I went to the ranch on several occasions during imoke's term and the only thing imoke put a pause on was the international mountain race which only took place three times in his tenure. Imoke's term sees the 2nd maintenance of the cable car from a company in Norway. Ayade destroyed everything plus the state water board.

ezugegere:
Though PDP and APC are both evil and have done this country a great harm, APC is worst in every indices

Reinaldo:
While so many Nigerians are hungry, unemployed and children are out of school. Even hospitals are not well-equipped, doctors not well paid, education not adequately funded, power supply is zero. Did they borrow money for this too? How can any sane person support this. 🤦🏻‍♂️

worksmart:
It was a project initiated by the incompetent GEJ administration , which was meant to be complete well before the 2014 Commonwealth Games to help us successfully bid for the games.

Unfortunately like 99% of infrastructure projects at the time the project ground to a halt and was abandoned and PMB administration restarted and completed in 2018.

So now because it has shut down due to low patronage , does not mean it cannot be revived in the future , especially if it is linked to existing busy rail lines .

I am sure that even US where Bloomberg is based have their own share of obsolete completed "white elephant projects" but they love to find negativity in Nigeria and Africa in general.