By Kingsley Adegboye

To meet the huge challenges of a megacity status which the existing Lagos infrastructure may not be able to cope with, the State Government last week disclosed that it has a master-plan to build infrastructure that can cater for forty million people, hence it has commenced the building of Independent Power Plants, IPPs across the state to take care of its power needs.

Making this known during a media parley, Lagos State Commissioner for Works  and Infrastructure, Obafemi Hamzat added that the state is also building roads, bridges and rail infrastructure to facilitate movement across the state for enhanced human and commercial activities.

The Commissioner poited out that the state has also expanded its capacity for water transportation and that is continuing., noting that Lagos State Waste Management Authority, LAWMA is on top of  waste disposal in the state and the capacities on that front are also expanding.

According to him, “I can go on and on in other areas of human endeavour. Lagos State is making good progress on all these fronts. As a mega city, there are unique challenges such as transportation, refuse disposal and others. Our approach is to face each of these challenges and tackle them one by one in a strategic approach. Therefore, for each sector of the economy we have the strategic plan which we are implementing.

‘’As a state, we are not struggling with our structural plan of infrastructural challenges. We have the master-plan that we are implementing. We certainly will not finish all our plans in one calendar year. That is not realistic given the backlog that exists. Lagos State Government believes that infrastructure development is a major plank on which poverty eradication can rest on. Hence, our concentration on major life and City/State changing projects such as Lagos- Badagry Expressway, Isheri-Oshun Jakande road which is now fully awarded to Hitech Construction Company to complement the bridge works that started some time ago.

‘’Also, the blue rail line is another of such projects. The overall target of the state is to develop sufficient infrastructure portfolio across the length and breadth of the state that ultimately allows for a competitive business environment. There are major roads across the state. Some are Federal roads while some belong to the state. The challenge is that it is important that these major roads are fully motor-able before we fix a huge number of the inner roads.

‘’Hence, the state government has gone ahead and fixed a lot of the federal roads thereby reducing our ability to fix the state road financially. However, the state has constructed a lot of the major roads and others are also under construction as we speak all across the length and breadth of the state. Last year we started the construction of 156 roads and majority of them are inner roads. It is important to also state that we have to manage the numbers of roads we are constructing at a time to prevent gridlock’’, he stated.

On government’s plans for urban and rural areas with regard to roads, Hamzat said ‘’as for the roads in rural areas, we use the same approach that is, rehabilitate as much as we can. But because we also know that we might not be able to do all in just a short time, we decided this year to grade and surface dress some roads as a palliative so as to give relief to road users. Examples are Isuti road, Powerline road in Ifako Ijaiye, Oke Agbo Street in Ojo L.G.A. and so many others.

‘’The essence is to allow for motor-able roads because it will be a traffic nightmare if we shut down all the roads at a single time for rehabilitation or construction even if the funds are available. The axle load on our roads is very high causing our roads to deteriorate faster. 93 per cent of containers coming into Apapa port will travel through Lagos roads.

The oil tankers and other heavy duty vehicles go through these same roads. They are important to the economy of the state since as a nation we don’t have a standard rail infrastructure. The state traffic law regulated the movement to these set of vehicles to certain time of the day. The effect of this really is about safety and better quality of life of all of us as road users.

‘’Some of the biggest threats to the roads are willful damage, conversion of roads to mechanic shops and car wash. Hence, the advocacy that we must as a community takes ownership of our roads. Concrete is an option; that is why we constructed the road leading to Gbagada hospital in Kosefe Local Government with concrete. The other part of that is that the initial cost is high. I must stress that with the major channelization of our tertiary drains across the state our roads will last longer. As people we must also protect our assets’’, Hamzat noted.