South-east and the railway modernisation project – The Sun

The issue of the Federal Government’s external borrowing received a hearing at the Senate earlier last week.  The $5.851 billion loan request submitted by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration and approved by the Senate for the modernisation of the country’s decrepit railway system, however, ran into problems following the exclusion of the South-East from the projects.  It was expected to be a nation-wide exercise, but red flags were raised when the senator from Abia South, Mr. Enyinnaya Abaribe, raised a motion entitled “Outright Omission of Eastern Corridor Rail Line in the request for the approval of Federal Government 2016-2016 External Borrowing (Rolling Plan).”
Apparently, the Eastern Corridor which is expected to traverse the Southeast geopolitical zone was missing in the overall plan, which Senator Abaribe found to be “inexplicable.” He noted that the loan was a Federal Government liability which must “be paid by all sections of the country… for the railway project to have meaningful impact on the development of the country, it should cover all parts of the country.”  Senator Abaribe called on the Senate to suspend further consideration of the loan until the exclusion of the Eastern corridor is resolved.  To calm matters, the Senate invited the Minister of Transportation, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, for a briefing, while the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, said he would ensure that no section of the country is excluded in the project.
The loan is from the Chinese EXIM Bank and the projects are in segments: the Lagos–Ibadan segment would cost $1.231 billion; the Kano–Kaduna segment would cost $1.146; Lagos–Calabar $3.474 billion.  The Eastern section was expected to link four geopolitical zones – the South-South, the South East, the North Central and the North East and pass through the key cities of Port Harcourt, Enugu, Aba, Makurdi, Lafia, Gudi, Bauchi and Maiduguri.
Senator Gbenga Ashafa, who heads the Senate Committee on Land Transportation, has tried to put a positive spin on the issue by saying that the Lagos–Calabar route “touches at least two major states in the South East – Anambra (Onitsha) and Abia (Aba).”
But, as much as Aba and Onitsha are important commercial centres in the South East, their inclusion looks like an afterthought. This is the same manner the major gas pipeline project was drawn up a short while ago excluding the entire Igbo land.  The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, suggested that the Port Harcourt-–Maiduguri segment would be captured in the next loan request.  That is cold comfort for any part of the country, save, of course, those areas beleaguered by the terrorist activities of Boko Haram.
It was no surprise, therefore, that the Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohaneze Ndigbo, through its President General, John Nnia Nwodo, issued a protest statement describing the exclusion of the South-East as yet another demonstration of injustice against Igbo people.  All fair-minded Nigerians would be all ears to hear the justification for the South East exclusion from a national railway modernisation scheme.
It is necessary for the government to always ensure a sense of equity and fairness in the location of national projects to nurse the bonds of unity and national cohesion.  A rail programme is always a difficult project, especially for Nigeria, which explains why we still ride on the 1896 snail-speed rail we inherited from colonial overlords.  The first credible talk of an attempt to do a standard gauge railway since independence was in 1982 during the Second Republic when the then Minister of Transport, Alhaji Umaru Dikko, proposed to replace the old rail at a cost of N2 billion.  Here we are today, 35 years later, still riding on our 1896 railways, still in awe of the ‘magical’ Kaduna–Abuja line, which took nearly a decade to build.  We must learn to appreciate our handicaps, especially in transportation, because a nation without trains cannot seriously say it has a dependable transportation system.  A good train system will change Nigeria.  That is why it should be connected to as many towns and cities as possible and leave no geo-political zone out.