Cautious optimism

• Published date: 10 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

The transportation sector is expected to gather speed on the back of emerging successes. But the odds remain, writes Adeyinka Aderibigbe

The Federal Government is desirous of consolidating the gains in the transportation sector.

The 2023 Budget signed into law last week gave a peek into the mindset of the government. The consolidation of the gains of railway modernisation, which began in 2002, but gained accelerated traction in the last seven years, is a priority of the government.

The administration would be spending N4.310 billion of its N21.5 trillion budget on the acquisition of new locomotives, coaches and wagons for the nation's growing rail networks. This is from the N20.452 billion budget, allocated to the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) in 2023.

Although 2022 could be described as the year of the locust that nearly drained the gains of the transportation sector, yet it ended on a positive note. The federal and some other sub-national governments, especially, Lagos, the fifth largest economy in Africa and Black race's first megacity, hope to consolidate rapid transformations that promise profound changes for more than 200 million Nigerians.

For 2023, the Federal Ministry of Transportation, one of the biggest beneficiaries of President Muhammadu Buhari's last budget, after the Ministry of Defence and Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, gets N126.53 billion.

Out of this, N70.45 billion goes into capital projects, N30.7 billion to finance bilateral and multilateral loans, while N18.01 billion goes for recurrent expenditure.

As at last December, Nigeria, like other nations of the world, has a mix of narrow and standard gauge rail line networks. While it has 2,603kms of narrow gauge rail lines bifurcated into two arteries - Eastern and Western Lines, which covered largely the whole country, (Western Line has 558.90kms while Eastern Line 2044.1kms); it also has a total of 670 kilometrage of standard gauge lines distributed between Abuja-Kaduna (AKTS), Itakpe-Warri (IWTS) and Lagos-Ibadan (LITS), as (Abuja-Kaduna 187 km, Itakpe-Warri 326km, and Lagos-Ibadan 157km).

Though the standard gauges were at various stages before 2015, Buhari, largely can be acknowledged as the architect of the modern rail system in Nigeria as all were delivered in the last seven and half years.

Though much of the strides to connect the other parts of Nigeria with the standard gauge were aborted in 2022, due to terrorists attacks which sacked the nation's Northcentral, Northeast and Northwest, the Buhari administration seemed to have consigned itself into history as not having tried, but hampered, thereby opting to consolidate on the lines constructed by providing them with adequate rolling stock to improve passenger traffic, thereby easing the yoke of loan repayments on the government.

Perhaps the greatest expectation, which arguably, may be of concern to every Nigerian is to ensure that whoever takes over from the Buhari administration has the same commitment to transportation and to see the railway as the main artery for mass movement in the country, thereby continuing on the task of connecting all the state capitals by rail in the foreseeable future.

Though none of the candidates have addressed issues bordering on transportation, it is not too certain that any of them could elevate the sector to a matter of national priority which the Buhari administration accorded it...