By Favour Nnabugwu
Federal Government, Thursday, blamed itself for the deplorable state of its highways, saying, however, that it would henceforth hold its road engineers responsible for any of its highways that was poorly supervised even as it has pruned down its consultants.

Minister of Works, Mr. Mike Onolememen made this known at the opening of the on-going three-day management retreat on Improving Road Sector Infrastructure for Socio-Economic Transformation at the Le Meridien Hotel, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, yesterday.

He charged the ministry’s employees to redeem the image and integrity of the govern-ment with respect to supervision of highways.

He said: “Some of the challenges in the road sector include very difficult terrains in some parts of the country and poor supervision of our projects.

”The issue of poor designs for our roads has become very worrisome. I have directed the review of the capacity of all consultants currently working for the Federal Ministry of Works with a view to retaining only competent ones for our roads designs as the ministry is no longer ready to make payments for substandard jobs.

”The era of omnibus payments to consultants that add no value to our work is over. Henceforth, the ministry engineers’ representatives will be held accountable for any shoddy work done by any of the ministry’s contractors.”

The Minister also informed that the country’s road network coverage had increased significantly over the last six decades from a modest 13,240 kilometres to 195,400 kilometres while state roads occupy 30,500 kilometres and local government roads encompass 130,600 kilometres.