The minister of power,works and housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, has disclosed that Nigeria’s infrastructure was aged and insufficient. He attributed his claim to the inability of subsequent administrations since 1970s to develop and expand the existing infrastructure.
Fashola stated this at the headquarters of Adam Smith International in London over the weekend at a forum organised by the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility with the theme: “Delivering Infrastructure: Lessons for Nigeria and the UK.”
“Since the great construction boom of the 1970s, and the maintenance of the early 1990s under the Petroleum Trust Fund, managed by President Buhari in an ad-hoc capacity during a very dark political period in Nigeria, our population has grown much faster than our infrastructure,” he said.
“But one thing is also certain, infrastructure ages and needs to be renewed from time to time, just as it needs expansion to respond to the number of users as a result of a globally expanding population and urbanisation,” he added.
Emphasising the need for the re-engagement as a plausible option in the aftermath of Brexit, Fashola noted that the modality for such re-engagement lay in the realm of policy and economic choices for the people and government of the UK.
“In the early 20th century, when our infrastructure was developed by the UK up to the 1970s when we were the UK’s largest trading partner, how did the UK’s economy fare because in that period, our inter-state rail was built by the UK, but today China is building our inter-city rail in spite of language barrier,” he stated.
“It defines whether we are secure or insecure in our homes, communities, cities or countries. Infrastructure is certainly defining in whether natural disasters result in temporary displacement or snowball into a humanitarian disaster,” he said.
He further described infrastructure as the big currency that no central bank printed but which all financial systems could support stressing that its sufficiency or dearth was a product of a choice between fiscal profligacy and fiscal prudence by a state.
“All of what I have said attempts to sum up the presence or absence of roads, bridges, hospitals and clinics, airports, seaports, ferry terminals, bus systems, bicycle lanes, traffic systems, Internet penetration, schools and universities, security apparatus, emergency response, drains, flood control systems, water supply,and fire-fighting systems,” he added.
