The Lagos State Commissioner for Works, Mr Femi Hamzat on Monday said the Federal Government is indebted to the Lagos State Government to the tune of N51 billion meant for road construction.
“We submitted a bid of 59 billion Naira based on all the roads that we have done and they came back and said 51 billion Naira but till today they (FG) have not paid a dime.
“Now that is what is affecting the building of our own inner roads”, he said on Sunrise Daily.
He noted that the Federal Government had set up a committee of engineers and auditor, three years ago that went round to the state to ascertain the level of road construction carried out by the state government on federal roads.
He, however, maintained that the state government embarked on repairing the federal roads because it would affect movements.
“If you don’t do them, people will not move around the state into the inner roads.
“Right now, we are fixing the expansion joints on Eko Bridge. That bridge could collapse if we don’t maintain it. It is costing us about 500 million Naira. So are we going to fold our arms because the federal government is not doing it.
“We have done 19 of them now and we are on the 20th and 21st” after which “we will do the bearing,” he said.
Mr Hamzat, who revealed that the Lagos State government was studying the Apapa Bridge, said: “We can’t do it all at the same time because that will lead to congestion.
He further noted that the Lagos State Government carried out a survey to find out the durability of all bridges in the state “and submitted the report to the Federal Ministry of Works and nothing is being done”.
He said it will be ‘amazing’ for the Federal Government to say that they do not have resources to pay for the repair of the federal roads in Lagos State because “when the revenue comes, the Federal Government takes 56 per cent, then two per cent for Ecology and one per cent for the Federal Capital Territory; that’s 59 per cent.
“So 41 per cent is distributed between the 36 states and the 774 local government areas.
“You can see that the majority of the resources goes to the Federal Government, so when they now say they don’t have the resource, it is amazing,” he said.
He said, according to global practices, “the ports take care of 10 to 15 kilometres radius of the port”, adding that the “Nigerian Ports Authority made 1.3 trillion Naira, but the Federal Government can’t fix the roads (Apapa-Oshodi Expressway)”.
“Eighty per cent of the containers that come into this country come through that road. It is a miracle that our roads are in that state in Apapa,” he said.
