• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road: Ganduje calls for peace, security to enable contractor complete project

Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road: Ganduje calls for peace, security to enable contractor complete project

Kano State governor, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, has called for peace from all stakeholders to enable the contractors handling the Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road project, Julius Berger Nigeria Plc, to continue with the great quality job it is implementing on the road.

Ganduje, who made the call at a town hall meeting held at the Kaduna State University main auditorium in Kaduna, reminded stakeholders at the meeting that he was a commissioner for works for six years in Kano before he became governor.

“Has any person here or anywhere complained about the quality of work Julius Berger is doing on the Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Road?” the governor asked, to which those gathered answered a thunderous ‘No’.

“Then, let us stick with what is good and give security and peace a chance for Julius Berger to continue doing the great quality job they are doing on the road. We in Kano are very satisfied with the excellent quality of the ongoing works on the road,” he said.

Lars Richter, managing director, Julius Berger Nigeria Plc, in a presentation said for reason of superior considerations regarding durable and lasting quality of its final delivery, the scope of works for the Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road has been altered from adhoc rehabilitation of broken segments to comprehensive reconstruction by the client, the Federal Government.

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Richter said the scope of works has been broken down into three sections – Section 1 stretching at 165.5km from Abuja to Kaduna; Section 2 comprising a length of 73.4km from Kaduna to Zaria; and Section 3 with a distance of 137.0km from Zaria to Kano. He said construction work is simultaneously going on all three sections of the road.

He said the A2 Highway is one of the most important highways, running from North to South through densely populated areas and the AKR is a critical part of this highway system, and therefore plays a tremendous role in industrial growth and socio-economic development.

“On this project we are pioneering the use of cold recycling methodology in Nigeria, a highly efficient and environment-friendly solution, in which the base layer of the road is produced by recycling the milled off bonded and unbonded pavement,” Richter said.

“In a five-step method the existing (damaged) asphalt and base course is milled at full depth and transported to a nearby site yard for processing at a mobile batching plant after crushing.

“The granulated material is treated utilising a precisely metered method to produce a homogeneous mix of bitumen-stabilised material (BSM) for paving the base layer of the road. The road layers are prepared by pre-spreading cement and stabilising the subgrade so that the produced base layer can be paved and placed. The asphalt surface course is paved at an increased depth of 12cm by using polymer modified bitumen (PMB) for the hot asphalt mixes,” he said.

Chief of staff to the president, minster of works and housing, minister of finance, Kano State governor, senators and members of the House of Representatives, community leaders, members of Julius Berger’s executive management and project implementation team, as well as members of the press had earlier undertaken a physical inspection tour of the project by road from Kano to Kaduna to see the ongoing works firsthand before the commencement of the meeting itself.

At all the inspection stops, Richter had briefed the project stakeholders on the technical nature of the ongoing works.

The current timelines for the delivery of the project show that Section 2 is scheduled to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2022, Section 3 in the first quarter of 2023, while Section 1 will be delivered in the second quarter of 2025.

Babatunde Fashola, minister of works and housing, reiterated the commitment of the Federal Government to completing the project, emphasised that President Muhammadu Buhari was passionate about the successful completion and commissioning of the project as well as other priority projects of his administration.

“Whatever measures it would take, the Buhari administration is determined to complete the project, especially during this administration’s tenure in office as a beneficial legacy for Nigerians,” Fashola said.

Responding to various concerns from stakeholders who wanted to know why the construction work on the road was taking long, the minister said, “Shortly after we flagged off the road, we received a letter from the senators in the National Assembly asking the Federal Government to expand the road from two lanes to three lanes… they wrote to the president and copied my Ministry.”

He explained that based on the directive from the presidency to undertake that expansion, there was the need to redesign an expansion to accommodate about 40 different bridges on the road to align with the lanes.

“So if they are going to expand from two to three lanes, a new design needed to be created. The process for doing that required us to hire a design consultant. We had to follow the procurement process established by the National Assembly,” Fashola said.

“The procurement process is a long one which entails advertising, waiting for a period of six weeks after advertisement, reviewing of tender, picking of consultant and going to the Bureau for Public Procurement and finally to the Federal Executive Council for approval to hire a consultant to do the design requested,” he said.

Fashola also disclosed that after going through all the processes of procurement for redesigning to three lanes, the Federal Ministry of Works was again instructed to revert back to two lanes earlier designed for the project due to insufficient funds.