Lawmakers on Tuesday passed a resolution asking the executive arm of government to make the sum of N300 billion available for urgent rehabilitation of failed roads in Niger State.
The resolution followed a motion of urgent national importance brought before Senators by the Senate Deputy Whip, Senator Sabi Abdullahi representing Niger North Senatorial District.
The motion which came through Order 42 and 52 of Senate standing rule, lamented the bad shape of the roads, which led to a protest by drivers of articulated vehicles who used their trucks to block the roads from Friday last week to the early hours of Tuesday, with attendant untold hardships on other road users.
Niger State, he explained has the longest federal road network of 2,263km out of a total of 32,000km of national federal roads network.
“The federal roads in Niger state stretched from the Abuja – Kaduna end to the Jebba – Mokwa – Makera – Tegina – Birnin Gwarimpa – Kaduna road to the Mokwa – New Bussa – Agwara – Kigera end which lies to the border with the Republic of Benin.
“Overall, the following are critical linkage roads within Niger State that provide logistical and vehicular movements between the North and South; especially the South West and North West corridors.
“Because of the massive land area of Niger State at 76,363km (representing about nine percent of the total land area of the country), all movements from North to South substantially traverse the State.
“Indeed, the massive haulage of heavy industrial goods such as petroleum products, iron rods, cement, finished manufactured goods, machines and equipment, electronic materials and goods, building materials etc, in which trucks and tankers are overloaded pits great pressure on the roads and thus are seriously devastating to the state of the roads”, he said.