Authorities of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), said the establishment lost huge revenues on the back of a stall in haulage services following a restriction on personal and vehicular movement by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to facilitate the nation’s Presidential and National Assembly elections slated to hold today February 16 but cancelled hours before take-off.
In a telephone interview with BusinessDay, Jerry Onche, regional district manager (RDM) Lagos District of the NRC said that establishment cancelled its passenger train service from Lagos to Kano last Friday so that passengers (numbering between 300 and 400 on one way trip) would not get stranded in transit while the election was ongoing.
Onche however declined to give our reporter an evaluation of the financial losses suffered by the NRC in the process. Other informed sources who spoke on condition of anonymity however said the estimated loss of revenue to the organisation’s freight and passenger services ran into millions of naira.
According to the Onche, “Normally we dont run mass transit train (MTT) weekends. We do freight on weekends, but the movement has been truncated as a result of the botched INEC election. The Lagos to Kano passenger train service would have left last Friday if not for the election. We would have carried about 200-300 people from Lagos on the Kano train if it had gone”.
Similarly, speedy attention towards the completion of the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail project which has been partly hampered by the movement of exhumed water and petroleum pipelines from the Lagos end for some time now suffered another setback as the scheduled movement of the pipes by the NRC today was put on hold.
BusinessDay checks reveal that the the NRC was scheduled to move export into APMT yesterday but APMT said it was shutting down operations till Monday due to the elections.
Shortly after the announcement of election postponement, APMT again advised the Nigerian Railway Corporation that they would resume freight movement by Saturday evening.
“We have to recall staff and crew that we asked to stay away. Also we were supposed to load water pipes for Lagos state this weekend, the pipes being relocated along the standard gauge route, we suspended it but now we have to do it between Saturday and Sunday.”
