Apapa gridlock: Fresh hope on Trailer Park as contractor returns to site

CHUKA UROKO
For motorists, businesses and the few residents still in Apapa, which is home Nigeria’s busiest seaport, there is hope, as Borini Prono, the contractor handling the construction of the trailer park on Apapa Oshodi Expressway has returned to site.
Borini Prono had literally abandoned the construction site for over 12 months for alleged lack of funding from the Federal Government, which, for undisclosed reasons, had turned blind eye on the project, making it the most enduring construction site in Lagos.
The contract for the construction of the trailer park was awarded back in 2010, as part of the response to the intractable gridlock on the Apapa Oshodi Expressway, which has become worse, and was awarded as an accompaniment to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the expressway by Julius Berger and Borini Prono.
The park is aimed to take away about 500 trucks, which are packed indiscriminately off the expressway, to allow more access to other road users. The Park is over 80 percent completed, but the access bridge that would take trailers into the park through the Liverpool Roundabout is largely uncompleted.
When BusinessDay visited the construction site Thursday, work was actually in progress on the access bridge. An official of Borini Prono, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they had been working since January.
Though the official would not agree that they had been off-site for quite a long time, BusinessDay reliably gathered that the contractor had been off site because it submitted project cost variation to the past administration which the President Buhari government had not attended to.
But the official, who could not say categorically how, admitted that money must have been given to the contractor for them to return to site. “There is no way we could have resumed work here if money was not given to them (referring to the management of the company); we cannot use our own money to do government’s work because it will be like giving banana to the monkey”, the official joked.
The official, who could not say exactly when they would finish work on the access bridge which is about 70 percent done, noted that the park might not be ready for use any soon because, “when we finish with the bridge, we have to fence the entire park round to make it safe and secure”.
Efforts to reach Borini Franco, a top management staff at Borini Prono, did not yield any fruit as his phone was said to be switched off. Similarly, no official of the federal ministry of works could be reached for comments on the project in which Apapa residents and businesses have invested so much hope.
But Babatunde Fashola, the minister for power, works and housing, had at the very last stakeholders meeting on Apapa late last year, assured that the Trailer Park would come on stream soon. Fashola who gave this assurance while disclosing that Dangote Group had committed to reconstructing the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway up to Oworonshoki, did not say when the park would be ready for use.
Apapa has, increasingly, become a metaphor for stress, suffocation and degradation. The premier port city is today under siege with little or no access to anywhere and everywhere. It has become an occupied territory where trailers, tankers and sundry trucks are mindlessly packed for days and months on any available space, including bridges, roads tracks and even streets/avenues.
Human life has been diminished, properties devalued and the entire environment degraded, leaving the once coveted port city a wasteland where some residents and businesses flee in droves and others marooned like birds in deserts.
Conversely, this is the same place where both the federal and Lagos state governments rake billions of naira revenue, but look the other way as businesses die, residents groan, and motorists spend hours on end to get into the port city for work or for business.