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 Daily
Independent Online.
* Monday,June 14, 2004.
Scrap Ministry of Works,
Jibunoh advises govt
By Dada Jackson
Senior Property & Environment
Correspondent, Lagos
An environmentalist, Chief
Newton Chukwukadibia Jibunoh, has advocated the scrapping of the Federal
Ministry of Works and its place, create Federal Ministry of Maintenance.
Jibunoh, who is also the chairman of Costain West African spoke in
an interview with the Daily Independent in his office at Apapa.
He hinged his proposition on the belief that the
Federal Ministry of Works had not been doing enough in the area of
maintenance.
He added that the idea of just constructing new roads
without maintaining the existing ones was not ideal.
He asked: “Of what use is it for
government to continue building new cities, new roads, new industries,
new stadia, new houses and multi-storey offices without maintaining the
old ones. The old must be maintained before new ones or you might as well
forget building new ones”.
According to him, the Federal Government
should put in place, a national policy that would inculcate in the
citizenry, maintenance culture, adding that the absence or the lack of
maintenance culture has been responsible for the dilapidated state of our
roads.
The chairman of Costain West African noted
that the enormous resources that had been committed to road construction
in the country could be regarded as money gone down the drain. He added
that this was a worrisome development, which if not stopped, would
continue to eat deep into the nation’s lean purse.
He wondered why the government would
continue to channel huge resources into the construction of new roads,
without maintaining the existing ones.
His words: “I am saddened and at a loss as
to why huge budgetary allocations would continue to be made available to
the Federal Ministry of works for the construction of new roads while
efforts are not being made by the same agency of government to maintain
existing roads in the country.
The environmentalist, who also spoke on
other issues, said that having being plunged into the environment, he
could no longer continue to betray his conscience by not highlighting
issues that are likely to plunge the country into an environmental
catastrophe in the coming years. According to him, the depletion of the
ozone layer had thrown some countries “except Nigeria” into panic on how
to control the effects and fallout of the phenomenon, adding that the rising
sea level and climate change coupled with the degradation of the
environment and the heat wave experienced sometime ago, call for
concerted efforts on the part of stakeholders.
He decried the havoc, which erosion had
wreaked in most parts of the eastern Nigeria, noting that a greater
percentage of the farmers in the east had migrated to Delta and Edo
states in search of greener pastures.
He said: “The good part of the north had
also migrated with their cattle to the south, also in search of
vegetation.”
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