The controversy dogging the Niger Bridge and the proposed Second Niger Bridge has again made it to the front burner roughly five years after media reports broached the possibility of the former's (Niger Bridge) collapse before December 2008. About the last quarter of 2008, it was widely reported, the imminent crumbling of the bridge before that year's Yuletide. A popular construction company, Setraco, had two years earlier, carried out some maintenance work on it, but experts from the firm and elsewhere were of the conviction that the maintenance exercise notwithstanding, the Niger Bridge was still at the risk of collapsing as a result of gully erosion threat from the Asaba end. Setraco's Design and Technical Manager, Elid Sheidid stated that much.
Then came reports that the erstwhile administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo awarded a close to N60 billion contract for the construction of the Second Niger Bridge to replace the death trap now called Niger Bridge. Accused of politicking with the project, Obasanjo was said to have indeed laid the foundation stone of the project which was to cost N58.6 billion before leaving office in 2007. But Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State said the purported contract awarded and the flag off of the project were all lies.
Obi said: "May be there is another document they have. The Second Niger Bridge is a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) between Anambra and Delta State governments, which are supposed to contribute 10 percent each and the Federal Government 20 percent. The contractor will borrow 50 percent of the total contract sum. We commenced a meeting among the three governments. The last was held a year ago (2007). So they can't be meeting without inviting us when we have paid 10 percent because that will amount to fraud. How can they say they have awarded the contract when we have not been attending meetings and nobody ever invited us?... What they did here... was a fraud".
Reports had it that the late President Umaru Yar'Adua also promised to construct a second Niger Bridge. Perhaps, his sudden demise was the undoing of the project. Presently, however, it would seem the brouhaha about the Second Niger Bridge stemmed from the suspicion that President Goodluck Jonathan's government has equally adopted the 'April Fool' style of awarding the contract for the new bridge. Indeed, a member of the House of Representatives and one of the aggressive protagonists of another Niger bridge, Cyril Egwuatu, made a startling revelation of how the leadership of Ohaneze Ndigbo had in response to Jonathan's promise of a second Niger Bridge, "assured Mr. President of 95 percent of votes in the South East come 2015", most probably under a desperate endorsement trade-off that undermined the voting rights of the Igbo.
Egwuatu said the president mandated two ministers Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (finance) and Mike Onolememen, an architect (works), to oversee the actualisation of the new bridge following an understanding struck at the Anambra State Government Lodge in Onitsha on August 30, last year; and that on several occasions, the works minister, particularly, had stated: "We are determined to do the ground breaking ceremony of the Second Niger Bridge in the first quarter of next year (2013)". Then the reality as Egwuatu stated it: "But even as we go into the third quarter of 2013, this lofty dream is yet to be achieved. In fact, the contract documents have not been signed with Julius Berger, the nominated bid contractor... if the existing Niger bridge collapses, ...my people will not accept the practice of ministers and government officials appearing and disappearing in black mourning dresses, declaration of several days of mourning and the National Flag being flown at half mast because God has given us enough grace to avoid this looming calamity".
Rep Egwuatu captured it all, especially when assurances had reportedly been given of adequate fund provisions for the project through the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P). But quite nauseating is the suggestion that as a prime beneficiary of the bridge, the Igbo must bribe Jonathan with their votes in exchange for the Second Niger Bridge which any responsible government should see as its bounden duty to construct. The vote-forbridge bargain seems a confirmation of the scarecrow strutting through the land in the name of civil political leadership. Worse still, the Jonathan government sees itself as an 'apostle' of electoral reforms.
Too bad! The Niger Bridge for which a replacement is now being sought was completed at the cost £5 million in December 1965 by the first civilian government of the late Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. It not only serves as the link between the South-East and some South-South states with their South-West counterparts, it is also a major gateway to the North through Benue and Kogi States. Being equally strategically located between Asaba, the Delta State capital and Onitsha, the commercial nerve centre of Anambra State, the volume of traffic it experiences on daily basis, occasioned by the flurry of economic activities, urbanization and the commuting public can only be imagined rather than expressed. For a bridge that would clock 50-years old by 2015, that is poorly maintained, it is disgraceful, the kind of politics that has trailed its replacement. And should calamity strike, as has been repeatedly predicted, the shame will not only be for Jonathan, but for the coterie of political office holders from the entire South East, especially, who cannot mount sufficient pressure on the FG since 1999 to do the needful.
National Mirror