There are very strong indications that many Lagosians have resigned to fate as travelling from one point to another within the city is becoming frustrating due to dilapidated and flooded road networks, blocked drainages and perennial traffic snarls that have impacted business activities significantly.
The citizens appear to be helpless as the road networks keep deteriorating by the day without any serious government intervention. Lagos residents say the situation should worry the state government, especially one that aspires to become a 21st century economy. It is an acid test for governance, they say.
Some of the flashpoints within the metropolis where heavy traffic has become the order of the day include Lagos-Badagry Expressway, Apapa, Agege Motor Road, and most roads in the hinterland.
For 10 years, the Lagos-Badagry Expressway has been under construction without completion. Many businesses have continued to count their losses, while many people living as far as Badagry, Agbara and adjoining suburbs and working on the Lagos Island and other parts of the city have rented living apartments uptown to make their movement easy.
This impacts negatively on household income.
In Apapa, for reasons ranging from multiple command structures, vested interests, and alleged uncooperative stance of federal government agencies, the traffic congestion, which defined the port city some months ago, has returned as all routes to the city have been overrun by trucks as of old.
However, the Presidential Task Team led by Kayode Opeifa, its executive vice chairman, has assured that the gridlock would be cleared in 24 hours starting from Wednesday afternoon.
On Wednesday particularly, flooding and collapsed road networks combined and conspired to inflict more pains on already traumatised motorists and commuters in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre.
Since the rainy season set in, it has been anguish for a large chunk of the estimated 21 million residents, as major roads and streets have become impassable, with potholes and craters sinking deeper, as the rains pound.
From Surulere to Victoria Island, Alimosho to Badagry, Agege to Mushin, Apapa to Lekki and Ikoyi, the situation is the same – gridlock and flooded roads, leaving vehicles stuck in the middle of nowhere.
From Ikeja-Along in Ikeja to Egbeda in Alimosho, transport fare was raised from N200 to N400, while from Oshodi to Mile 2 went up N300 from N150 charged under normal situation.
The long stretch of Ahmadu Bello Way in Victoria Island was left in flood, with vehicular movement impeded. It was the same situation on Akowonjo-Egbeda-Isheri stretch, where residents were seen scooping water from their homes, in what was largely attributed to collapsed drainage system.
Remedial efforts by the state government have led to nowhere. Areas where the Lagos State Public Works Corporation (LSPWC) had carried out palliative works have collapsed again all too sudden.
Commissioner for works and infrastructure, Aramide Adeyoye, says government is waiting for the rains to subside to return to the roads. Her position was recently re-echoed by the state governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who spoke at
The Platform, an event organised annually by the Covenant Christian Centre, Iganmu.
The situation, expectedly, has been worse in Apapa where, like before, tankers and sundry trucks have come back forcefully, occupying available spaces and making access to the port city pretty difficult. The present situation has also raised both journey time and transport fare by over 200 percent.
Apapa before the last six months was a nightmare, a degraded and suffocating environment where traffic congestion paralysed economic activities, forcing residents to flee and businesses to die or relocate to sane environments at great cost.
But the setting up of the PTT, which has Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as chairman, put an end to that. It seems, however, from the current traffic situation, that joy in this port city has a slender skin because the gridlock is here again.
In the past couple of weeks, motorists have been experiencing serious challenges accessing Apapa, because of what has been attributed to the collapse of the manual call-up system fashioned by the task team but managed by NPA.
The chaos that is building up, once again, in Apapa after a commendable work done so far in clearing the congestion and gridlock by the task team has been blamed mainly on rising inefficiency in port operations in both Apapa and Tin Can ports which NPA supervises.
AP Moller, one of the terminal operators at the ports, is alleged to be very inefficient in its operations and this, according to port users, is because the NPA is failing in its oversight functions.
Members of the task team, truck drivers and transport unions who spoke to our reporters all blamed NPA for the return of the gridlock, accusing it of working at cross purposes with the task team.
But NPA says it would not trade blame with the Presidential Task Team for blaming it for the return of traffic congestion in Apapa.
Adams Jatto, general manager, corporate & strategic communications of the NPA, who spoke to BusinessDay on phone, said the ports authority had discovered that there has been an increase in number of tankers coming into Apapa, which the NPA was not responsible for.
He said that the tankers were coming into private jetties around Apapa to lift petroleum products.
“We do not have issues with the Presidential Task Team because we have to work together. Rather than shifting blame, it is better for us to know the remote cause of the traffic. However, we had issues with the Lilypond Transit Park. And because of the fire incident that happened last week, the park was shut down temporarily from doing business,” he said.
Jatto, who said that the petroleum tankers are under NUPENG and not within the responsibility of the NPA, assured that the authority was making plans to determine how the tankers could be better managed.
CHUKA UROKO, MIKE OCHONMA, JOSHUA BASSEY & AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE
