By Favour Nnabugwu

Federal Government yesterday absolved itself of blame over the deplorable state of  highways caused by poor supervision and road designs.

It was on that premise that the Federal Government held its road engineers responsible for any bad state of its highways whilst it had reviewed and pruned down its consultants.

Minister of Works, Arch Mike Onolememen, at the opening of the on-going 3-day management retreat, entitled Improving Road Sector Infrastructure for Socio-Economic Transformation, in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, charged the ministry’s employees to redeem the image and integrity of the Federal Government with respect to its highways.

Onolememen 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 road 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. “