Nigeria needs a reset!

I DARE say I am totally upset about this very debilitating experience on the federal roads. When I hear federal road, I always imagine roads like the autobahn in Germany which I have driven on so many times, built during Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

The autobahn with over 12,000 kilometers of 6-lane highway built in 1936 and still maintained till date without potholes.  

As I traveled recently, I saw the state of the Nigerian federal roads and you can’t compare with the autobahn.

Worthy of note is the Warri-Sapele road just after the Benin bypass bridge! I must confess, if hell had a boulevard it would be on that road. Yes, it is that bad. 

On investigation and after interviewing five residents, they claimed the reason it hasn’t been fixed is because it is a federal road. They went further to tell me that the Governor of Edo State had planned to fix the road but the minister in charge claimed it was a federal road! This is ostensibly due to political reasons.

I have constantly heard this federal-state road dichotomy…  and I must confess it’s deadly like a hemophiliac suffering an hemorrhagic fever. It looks to me as though the only explanation for inefficiency is the exclusive list and concurrent list dichotomy as enshrined in the constitution, where the federal government takes the lion share and inefficiently run the country’s infrastructure.

I don’t see why states can’t have rail lines that cut across their states and run by them. Sure, they can improve their revenue with those ventures.  This why my argument has always favoured the 1960 constitution which provides a full enabling environment for the states to thrive.

That’s why I support the calls for restructuring the country and developing viable model that works because the federal government has been shown to be grossly ineffective over the years.

I dare say ‘federal road my foot’  because the viabilIty of contracts are hinged on political considerations, which doesn’t give a level playing field for development of the country. It saddens me that we have lost the rightfully needed developmental oomph…

Nigeria needs a reset!

• Oseni, writer and journalist, is an anchor on the AriseTv The Morning Show