A NEW approach to fixing federal roads across the country "before the cracks turned to ditches," to reduce the cost of maintenance and reduce carnage, has been devised by the Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA), according to authorities of the agency.
The new approach, as disclosed by the agency's Managing Director, Engr. Gabriel Amuchi, involved setting up of inspection teams to monitor the state of the roads and the establishment of a quick action squad that repairs spots that have been identified to be failing.
The FERMA boss, who spoke through the agency's Secretary and Legal Adviser, Mrs. Stella Anukam, disclosed this at the palace of the Aro of Akure, Chief Adeyemi Adedipe during a courtesy visit Friday, added that the squad has enough financial, personnel and material support to carry out immediate repairs before the identified bad spots deteriorate further.
Anukam, who was in Ondo State as the leader of a team of officials of the agency on inspection tour of on-going rehabilitation works in the three states of Ondo, Delta and Edo, said the management of the agency had discovered that lack of immediate action in road repairs, was the major cause of the bad states of roads in the country.
According to her, "FERMA started the quick intervention programme because we discovered that if these roads have been fixed at the initial notice of failure, a lot of money and energy that are dissipated at the failed stage would be saved. Prevention, as they say, is better than cure.
"The surveillance teams that have been put together cover the whole of the country and they bring progress reports on the states of the roads to the management regularly. That is why we have been able to prevent new failures to a large extent in the last few months."
In his address to the team, Adedipe, who was described by Anukam as one of the major stakeholders in FERMA, by virtue of his being a former member of the agency's board, tasked governments at all levels to show more assistance to the body to ensure smooth maintenance of roads across the country.
He said that, "Government should also pay more attention and commitment to giving the roads to concessionaire who will be saddled with building and maintaining the roads, but not to the detriment of Nigerians by way of cut-throat toll fees. This will reduce the burden of road maintenance on the neck of government."
Adedipe also urged stakeholders to start the immediate implementation of the FERMA Amendment Act 2000, which stipulates that five percent of oil subsidy should go to the agency, 40 percent of which will be retained in Abuja, while 60 percent will be given to states with parallel agencies saying, "With this, the problem of paucity of funds would be solved."
The Guardian