• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Gains of restructuring Nigeria’s road transport system

Effective and efficient transport system – vital for Nigeria’s economic success

Road transportation is a basic requirement for the success of any nation, regardless of its industrial capacity, population size or technological development. Part of the challenge of the Nigerian transport system is its poor design which has been a hindrance from inception.

It’s responsible for why we are unable to scale up to meet greater demand. There is urgent need for our nation to upgrade the state of our road transportation system and calls for urgent approach in order to make it attractive for both local and foreign investments which is one of the ways of boosting the huge potentials in our road transportation system.

A 2018 World Bank report on global logistics performance index placed ranked Nigeria 110th with a score of 2.53, a decline when compared with the 2016 LPI ranking of 90th position and a score of 2.63. Germany has remained consistent as the top performer for the past few years. South Africa has an LPI score of 3.38 and was ranked 33rd globally, far above Nigeria.

Our road transportation infrastructure is in a very poor state and falls short of the countries we would like to be compared with as the giant of Africa. Our road transport system has an insufficient infrastructural system in place to meet the evolving trend globally. Our road transportation systems ranks very low in terms of the quality of our infrastructures despite having the ability of accelerating the ease of doing business, this is responsible for the low investments opportunities in our road transportation sector by foreign players.

Our nation is still very far from the world’s best practices in road transportation systems, some of the major challenges affecting our road transportation systems are the need to review and upgrade the policies which is the major challenge affecting the system. Other challenges are undefined bus shelters, insufficient pedestrian infrastructures, lack of CCTV, unsignaled junctions, bad roads, road-side parking, high traffic demand/motorization rate, poorly planned junction geometry, insufficient public transport modes, the unavailability of alternative roads, road encroachment, lack of traffic information and absence of real time passenger information.

Others are poor driving licensing systems, recklessness and impatience of drivers, insufficient speed limit signs, inadequate off-street parking provision, indecent behaviour of drivers, ineffective enforcement regime to curb indiscipline among drivers, flooding of the carriageway resulting from poor drainage infrastructures especially in rainy season, hawking and street trading, fragmented bus service, lack of pedestrian walkways, high level of operational indiscipline, lack of major fleet operators, high security challenges ,unauthorized parking garage with their spill over effects on the carriage way, unsafe and uncomfortable vehicle conditions, poor traffic enforcement regime and congestion arising from lack of traffic systems management (TSM) measures.

In order to address some of the challenges stated above in our road transportation system there is need for proper administration and management of our road transport systems across all routes and transport terminals across the nation. This will definitely generate more revenues for the various states and the federal government. This will help generate more revenues for timely maintenance and infrastructural upgrade. Professionals and well trained transport experts should be given opportunities to manage the various road transport terminals across the nation.

Designing and implementing a blueprint in the road transport sector will ensure all road transport companies, car rental and leasing companies, commercial vehicle operators and various road transport terminals, parks, agents across the value chain are duly registered and granted licenses and permits which should be handled by the Federal Ministry of Transportation at a fee which shall be renewed periodically for all taxes and dues to be remitted to federal government.

Centralization of the registration process would promote improved security, safety and will help improve the quality of the standards of vehicles on our roads; it will also help entrench good behaviour on all road users and will help achieve improved services by all players across the road transport system.

The deployment of enterprise resources planning (ERP) software in the management of the road transport system will help capture all activities within the road transport system and the Nigerian economy stands to gain millions of dollars and also thousands of job opportunities annually. There are a lot of government revenue leakages which end up in the hands of a lot of unregistered players within the sector because of poor monitoring systems and management systems in the road transport sector.

The present culture of maintaining and monitoring all activities within the road transport system is very far from satisfactory and it is obvious the public sector funds through budgetary allocations are just insufficient to maintain the infrastructures and facilities across the entire road transport system in Nigeria.

There is urgent need for the Nigerian government to take steps in the right direction to evaluate and restructure the current status of our road transportation system, to provide a reliable, more efficient and effective solution of blocking some of the revenue generating loopholes in the system.

 

Festus Okotie