Some residents of Ugbolu and Illah communities in Oshimili North Local Government Area of Delta have decried the deplorable condition of the Asaba-Ugbolu-Illah federal road, calling for its repair.
Some of the residents, who spoke on Friday in the two communities, described the road as a death trap.
They stressed the need for urgent government intervention to alleviate the suffering of the road users and save them from robbery attacks by bandits who waylay them at the bad spots.
A farmer, Mr John Anosike, said due to the bad state of the road, farmers in Illah were often attacked by armed robbers on the bad spots while taking their produce to Asaba for sale.
According to him, the stretch between Ugbolu and Illah has so many farm settlements, including the Benin-Owena River Basin authority in Ngegu, Illah. Anosike said that transport fare along the road had increased as a result of the bad state of the federal road.
He said: “when the road was fairly good, we paid just N100 fare from Illah to Asaba, a journey that lasted for about 15 minutes. But, now drivers plying the route charge N300 and even more.
“We, the farmers, are at the receiving end. We pay so much to transport our produce from the farm to the market and at the end we sell most of them at very low prices.
Mr Kenneth Eziashi, a civil servant called on the state government to immediately do something on the road to save the communities from being cutoff form Asaba, the state capital. He expressed worries that with the “clock-in-clock-out” policy of the present administration in the state, civil servants living in the communities would find it extremely difficult to work in Asaba.
“We are calling on both the federal government and the state government to intervene to save the road from total collapse and to give the people a sense of belonging,” Eziashi appealed.
NAN recalls that the Delta Commissioner for Works, Chief James Augoye, said recently that the state government had repaired some federal roads in the state.
He, however, said that the Asaba-Ugbolu-Illah road had yet to be attended to due to financial constraint.
