FALSE DAWN IN RAILWAY IN RAILWAY SECTOR - Punch Editorial Board A road trip across Nigeria today is an exercise in delays and anguish. Not only are the roads decrepit, an endless caravan of trailers and trucks hauling petroleum products and other goods from one point to the other compounds the chaos around the country. Countless trucks park illegally on the kerb, creating a disorderly spectacle. Ordinarily, most of these goods should be ferried by rail. But in the past 20 years or so, the rail system has broken down. Consequently, Nigerians now move goods by road. This is an anomaly. The trucks have caused untold hardship to road users: they are slow in speed, thereby clogging the roads; and their weights destroy the roads. The Corps-Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps, Osita Chidoka, recently warned, “As of last year, 5,000 trucks plied our roads daily to move about 150 million litres of fuel we consumed. If the … economy grows as it’s being projected, this means that Nigeria would require 20,000 trucks daily to fuel the economy.” The effect is uncountable motor accidents and huge loss of man-hours. We cannot continue on this disaster-laden path, especially when there is a far better alternative that the railway sector provides. Last month, the Nigerian Railway Corporation celebrated a new dawn: after a 17-year hiatus, it resumed haulage operations between Lagos and the North. “We’re demonstrating our ability in expanding our haulage and service level with the opening of this train-load of 20, 40-foot container wagons from Apapa Wharf (Lagos) to Kaduna/Kano…,” said the NRC managing director, Adeseyi Sijuwade. Chike Okogu, the SURE-P Railway Convener, said the agency contributed to the railway revival by partnering the NRC. While it is good to end the 17-year break, it is simplistic of government officials to eulogise such intangibility. Over time, Nigeria has failed to exploit the advantages derivable from the rail sector. Instead, a nation that the British imperialists gave 3,000km of rail tracks at independence in 1960 has succeeded in adding only 506km of tracks since then. In spite of official claims, successive federal administrations have attached little importance to the railway issue. It reeks of mismanagement when the railways, which moved 11 million passengers and 3 million tonnes of goods in 1961, nosedived by 2004 to the level of moving only 1.8 million passengers and 60,000 tonnes of goods. The major problems of the railway sub-sector are the 1955 Railway Act, corruption and the opacity that governs public transactions in Nigeria. There is also the inability of government to muster the political will to implement the liberalisation road map enunciated by the Bureau of Public Enterprises. In its bid to revive the sub-sector, the Sani Abacha military dictatorship in 1995 awarded a $500 million contract to modernise the Lagos-Kano rail line to the Chinese construction giant, CCECC. Despite the loss Nigeria incurred after CCECC failed to execute the contract, the Olusegun Obasanjo Administration reawarded the same Lagos-Kano rail modernisation contract to the same company at the sum of $8.5 billion. In 2008, Robert Ejenavi, a former Auditor-General of the Federation, told a public hearing that “the nation spent over $826.6 million” on the railways without results. Conservatively, the Goodluck Jonathan Administration has awarded railway contracts worth more than $3 billion. This is in addition to budgetary allocations of N104 billion since 2009 to the NRC. Yet, all the avalanche of financial provisions has gone to waste, with the railways still highly inefficient. What to do? For starters, the Federal Government should stop throwing money around to revitalise the railways. The money from the government is a trifle when it comes to the needs of the sub-sector. Such funds should be redirected to other sectors like health and education. Although it has a 25-year Railway Strategic Plan, the Federal Government has to implement the plan developed by the BPE that provides for the unbundling of the NRC into lots. The lots will be given out as concessions or sold; there will also be the creation of a rail track authority to regulate the industry; and the consolidation of the corporation’s holdings into a commercial and privatised firm. This move will be immediately followed by getting the obsolete Railway Act of 1955 repealed. This law is the major problem that has prevented local and international private investments from going into the sector. Till today, the government has not explained why the proposals of the Canadian firm that offered to build a fast-rail service between Lagos and Abuja, and the O’odua Group that wanted to build a similar facility between Lagos and Ibadan, were not approved. The effects of an efficient rail system are unquantifiable to the economy, instead of the archaic changes currently being celebrated as revolution by the NRC, in which the Lagos-Kano trip takes 32 hours. Furthermore, private operators will open up new routes and this will generate more employment in the process. In the US, an investment of $1 billion in the sector generates between 12,300 and 26,600 jobs. An efficient rail system will significantly reduce the travel time. This will reduce the carnage and wear and tear on the roads.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 15:15:47 +0000
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