Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has been urged to lead other members of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to visit the Lagos seaports to see how bad the roads are.
Some Apapa residents, motorists and statekeholders in the maritime industry said the visit would enable the Federal Government to assess the state of the Apapa and Tin-Can Island ports.
They accused the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, of not attending to the roads, despite being the immediate past governor of the state.
Among the stakeholders are members of the Bible Society of Nigeria who asked the government to fix the roads and reduce users’ suffering.
The group said it was no longer news that the Apapa/Oshodi Expressway and the Ijora/Apapa road were deplorable and begging for attention.
The group’s Secretary-General and Chief Executive Officer, Dare Ajiboye, said the roads posed danger to life and also have negative effects on trade and commerce.
“The appalling state of these roads does not project a good image for our country. Foreigners who come into the country through the ports will not see these roads and give us the respect we deserve as a nation. The stress of going in and out of Apapa and its attendant health challenges have adverse effects on the productivity of the nation,” he said.
Other stakeholders spoke in similar vein, when they paid a condolence visit to the Secretariat of the Maritime Reporters’ Association of Nigeria (MARAN) at Atlantic House, Apapa, over the death of a member, Segun Agbolade, at TrinityBus Stop, Lagos.
Agbolade, an alumnus of the Lagos State Polytechnic, worked with Sky Times before his death.
The stakeholders wondered why it was difficult for successive Ministers of Works to fix the roads despite that the Federal Government through the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) earned about $10 billion from the Lagos ports between 2006 and last year.
The President, Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu, said the revenue excluded the over N150 billion collected from the Lagos Port Complex (LPC) and Tin-Can Island Port.
“Few days ago, a journalist covering the maritime beat was gruesomely murdered on the road leading to Apapa port by an hopeless truck driver. The sudden death and other vices along the road would have been averted if the Federal Ministry of Works headed by the former governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Raji Fashola, has been alive to its responsibility of fixing the most dangerous roads leading to any of the seaports across the world. “