The Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA), has blamed its inability to meet up to expectations on misunderstandings of its responsibilities.
In an interview cited by BizWatch Nigeria, FERMA’s Managing Director (MD), Nurudeen Rafindadi stated: “First of all, FERMA is charged with the responsibility of monitoring and maintaining federal roads only. Monitoring and maintaining are one aspect of our job while the federal road is another aspect. The primary mandate of the agency is to periodically maintain roads that are alive, not dead.
Nowadays, when people see any bad road in state municipals or rural communities or even private estates, they ask what Ferma is doing, but they don’t know it is not our job. We are also not mandated to repair roads that have expired or exceeded their life cycle. For example, the Abuja-Kaduna Road was constructed in 1990 and it is currently 31 years old. Ideally, this road should be rehabilitated after 15 years and this means taking the entire surface, reconstructing and relaying the asphalt, which make the roads durable for another 10-15 years.”
“But if we maintain a section today, the next section will be damaged by tomorrow. This will put a dent on the work done and people will ask what Ferma is doing since they saw us reconstructing the other sections.
“I must add that rehabilitation, reconstruction, or construction of new roads is not our job. We are mandated to conduct routine and periodic maintenance so as to make our roads last longer.
The situation we are in today is that 80% of 36,000-kilometer federal roads need complete repairs because they were built on or before 1999 and have exceeded their life cycles,” he added.
