No road in Nigeria has grabbed as much media attention in recent times as the East/West highway, except may be the equally as deplorable Lagos-Ibadan highway. This strategic highway linking Benin to Calabar, through Warri, Port Harcourt and Uyo, has been the subject of debate and controversy. It's dualisation was given by the dreaded Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) as a condition for peace.
The road was the focus of debate and unbridled anger again on Monday when thousands of travellers, including international guests from Ghana and other parts of the world, were stranded at a failed portion of the road for several hours. The foreigners who were attending the Environment Summit organised by a Niger Delta group, Center for Peace and Environmental Justice (CEPEJ), were locked down there for over three hours, despite being escorted by a long military convoy.
The journey from Benin City to Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital was not supposed to take longer than two hours. But, they spent hours at a short distance from Umeh Junction (before Patani) to Patani Bridge. The cocoon of comfort provided by the air-conditioned vehicles they rode in was not enough to hide their frustration.
Still, they were luckier than hundreds of other stranded users of the road who had to trudge for kilometres to get pass the failed portion before taking another vehicle to their destinations within and outside the region.
The scene was like the flood disaster of 2012 all over again when that area of the road and communities therein were cut off from other parts of the country for several weeks.
Mr. Eghosa Osayande, a civil engineer who works for a German construction giant, told our reporter he left Port Harcourt before the break of dawn on that Monday morning. "I thought I would get to Warri before 9am to resume work."
His timing was perfect until he got to Patani at 7:24am. Three hours later, he was forced to make the long trek pass Umeh Junction before getting a vehicle to Ughelli and later to Warri. It was past 2pm when he got to the office.
The most unfortunate victims were those who drove their cars and were forced to wait, until the road was 'fixed' and opened to traffic at snail-speed several hours later.
"Look at me," one of the stranded motorists told our reporter at the scene, "I left Port Harcourt this morning for a 2pm meeting in Benin City. I felt that I could get there by latest 11am and attend to some businesses before the engagement began. Here I am at 5pm; I don't even know when I will get to Benin. The meeting is over already and I can't go forward or backward."
The East/West Road has been a sore spot for people of the Niger Delta, particularly because it leads to the home state of President Goodluck Jonathan.
The knotty gridlock started around the Bomadi Junction, which leads to the home town of the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Elder Godsday Orubebe, whose ministry is handling the road construction. Orubebe has assured Nigerians that the road would be completed by December 2014, but with the level of progress so far, it is hard to see how that target can be realised.
Speaking on the fate of the delegate to its seminar on Tuesday morning, Comrade Sheriff Mulade, the National Coordinator of CEPEJ, described it as shameful.
He said: "It is a failure on the part of government and agency responsible for the road. It is a bigger failure on the part of the Federal Government, which has failed to put the road in order after all these years. If the road is in place, this development would be have been avoided."
Mulade lamented the negative experience and distress of the guests who arrived Yenagoa several hours after their expected arrival time. He urged the Federal Government and the ministry to put pressure on the contractor, Setraco Nigeria Limited, to increase the speed of work and save Nigerians endless hours wasted on the road.
Eyewitnesses at the scene told our reporter that Monday's gridlock on the strategic road was caused by a failed section of the road at the Agoloma Junction section of the road on Monday. Residents of the area said the perennially troubled spot had gradually deteriorated over the past few weeks before it finally collapsed on Sunday night.
"We expected that the contractors which official constantly pass through the road should have seen it and done palliative repair before it finally divided the road into two halves yesterday (Monday). But it is the usually Nigerian culture of waiting until it becomes too bad before doing anything about it," a community leader from Ohore, who was also caught up at the jam, told our reporter.
Some of the affected travellers, who spoke with Niger Delta Report, expressed dissatisfaction with the pace and strategy adopted by Setraco. They lamented the company's perceived haphazard schedule on the road.
"They will start work on a particular point and without completing it, they would jump to another section, leaving the first place worse than them met it. Also, you would expect that they would fix an alternative route for motorists before opening up a particular spot. But they don't do that, they just carry on with their job leading to severe hold-ups on several points along the road," a driver of one of the transport lines that frequent the route said.
According to the driver who asked that neither his name nor his employer's be used in this report, is that while hapless travellers are stranded on the road, Setraco officials cruise through, driving against traffic at breakneck speed because of the intimidating presence of large detachment security operatives, including soldiers and mobile policemen, attached to them. The security operatives randomly molest travellers who cross their path.
"May be if they pass through the same road, and go through the same waste of time as travellers and motorists face on the road they would see the need to plan their work in a way that it will have minimal effect on movement on the road," the driver added.
It is not only Setraco's mode of operation on the road that has elicited anger. Our checks revealed that motorists and locals along the busy highway blame the company's perceived lack of concern to safety for some of the ghastly accidents that occur on the road on daily basis.
Our findings revealed that several dangerous gullies and drains are opened by the company without caution signs to alert drivers on the dangers ahead of them. In one of the locations before Yenagoa junction in Bayelsa State, our reporter saw huge pits opened up by the company's excavation andn dredging operation.
It was also gathered that until recently the Agbarho bridge in Ughelli, Delta State was a notorious accident spot for several months before the community deployed beacons at the entrance to the bridge.
A newspaper sales representative in Warri said vehicles randomly "flew" into the river before the community leaders deployed drums to an opening between the onward and outward bridges a few months ago.
The son of a traditional ruler in Patani (Delta) and two other persons were crushed to death on Saturday 21 September, when his Toyota Highlander Sports-Utility Vehicle (SUV) crashed into one of the concrete barrier placed on the road around Evwreni Community in Ughelli.
Such pitfalls along the road makes it one of the most dangerous road in the country with dozens of accidents and deaths recorded on a daily basis.
By Tuesday afternoon, the road had been partially restored. But, for how long it remains passable before another blockade is anybody's guess.
