Contractors handling over 184 federal road projects have abandoned the various sites due to lack of funding from the Federal Government and the huge debt owed them by the Federal Ministry of Works.
Saturday PUNCH reliably learnt that following the decisions of the contractors to abandon the sites, N1.76trn federal road projects across the country had suffered setback.
The amount is the total cost of ongoing federal road projects across the six geo-political zones of the country.
The President, Federation of Construction Industry, the umbrella body for construction companies, Mr. Solomon Ogunbusola, in an interview with Saturday PUNCH, said all federal roads that had not been completed had been abandoned.
The contractors said they were owed over N600bn, adding that although part of the sum was owed by state and local governments, over 80 per cent of the amount was owed by the Federal Government.
This, according to them, was largely the reason why they decided to abandon the various project sites across the country.
They explained that their decision was not in protest against the government, but was purely because they could not function without funds.
The contractors could not state the exact number of ongoing federal road projects abandoned across the country, but findings showed that 184 projects were classified as ongoing by the Federal Government as at September 2014.
The North-Central Zone had 29 projects with a total length of 1,201.81km and a cost of N294bn; North-East had 26 projects, 1,219.65km long and cost N314bn; North-West had 20 projects, 1,040.22km long and cost N188bn; while the South-East had 45 projects stretching 1,251.4km with a worth of N357bn.
The South-South had 33 ongoing projects, 739.57km long costing N245bn; while the number of ongoing projects in the South-West was put at 31, stretching 1,072.63km at a total cost of N365bn.
The total number of ongoing projects at the time this report was done by the FMW in September 2014 was 184, and the projects were meant to cover a cumulative length of 6,525.63km across the country at a total cost of N1.765tn.
Source: Punch
