Almost two weeks after the Presidential Taskforce on the Apapa Traffic Gridlock ended its two-week extension to complete its work, Apapa bridges and roads are still largely occupied by trailers and tankers while the Trailer Park on Apapa-Oshodi Expressway is half-empty.
The park on which construction has been on-going since the past 10 years was declared open recently when Vice President Yemi Osinbajo came to inspect the facility designed to accommodate about 500 trucks along with other projects within the port city.
Motorists and Apapa residents had thought that the visit of the vice president and the phantom opening of the Trailer Park would bring the Apapa story to end or, at least, reduce it considerably.
But at the construction site on Wednesday morning, BusinessDay found out that the ‘opening’ of the park was a mere smokescreen aimed to pacify the visiting vice president and to make him believe that the park was truly ready for use while it was not.
“If not for orders from the Presidency which is insisting that the trucks should leave the roads for the park, we don’t want them to come in here because we are still working,” a Borini Prono official told our reporter at the site.
The official, who did not want to be named, lamented federal government’s delay in releasing money for the speedy completion of the park which, he recalled, was started during Musa Yar’Adua regime. “We are even using our money to do some of the things we need to do here and this is affecting payment of workers salary,” the official disclosed.
Work on the infrastructure facilities at the park was still on-going as the time of our visit. Workers were seen casting columns on the shoreline protective wall; they were also working on the electric poles, the toilet facilities and water boreholes.
Only a few trucks were littered on the park and they were said to be empty as those laden with goods were not allowed into the park.
It remains to be seen what the taskforce has achieved since it was set up following a directive by President Muhammadu Buhari on April 25, 2019. Though the taskforce has been able to achieve a free-one-lane for other road users on Apapa-Ijora Bridge, that free-one-lane is neither predictable nor reliable.
Attempts to reach Kayode Opeifa, Executive Vice Chairman of the taskforce on phone for his comments was futile as his line “is unreachable at the moment.”
Apapa residents, business owners and motorists are not only surprised and worried that the trucks have continued their occupation of the bridges, they are also angry. “We cannot settle for one-lane on the roads and bridges; the trucks should leave completely,” Bode Karunmi, Apapa GRA Residents Association fumed in a telephone interview.
Karunmi noted that both the truck owners and other road users are tax payers, arguing that if LASTMA could impound his car for wrong parking on the road, they should also impound the trucks that are parked almost permanently on the bridges and roads in Apapa.
He wondered why what happened when President Buhari came to Apapa for campaign could happen again, threatening that the residents might go to court , if anything, to name and shame the perpetrators of the siege on the port city.
“Lawyers in Apapa should be able to do this pro-bono; Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other stakeholders should come together and pile pressure on these people who are holding us hostage so that Apapa should be free from their stranglehold,” Karunmi stated.
CHUKA UROKO
