TheCable

BY BABAJIDE BALOGUN

Ibadan lo mo; o mo layipo

There is a refrain in Ibadan which oftentimes is used to welcome a new visitor to the city. It goes by saying that you only know Ibadan, you do not know its circular movements (layipo). The point that is to be drawn home is that Ibadan is a circular city and that is one magic behind the greatness of the ancient city.

Since the days of former governor Rashidi Ladoja’s administration, there have been attempts to adopt the circular road network in Ibadan to improve the public transportation system in the city. The Ibadan Circular Road Project was conceptualised with three phases to its execution. Because of the political instability that affected governance during the Ladoja administration, the then government did not have much time to execute the project. But owing to the brilliant idea of the concept, the succeeding administration keyed into it.

Towards the middle of the second term administration of former governor Abiola Ajimobi, the Oyo State government in 2017 decided to adopt the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) model for the execution of the first phase of the project. It is a 32 km stretch of road that takes commuters coming from Lagos end of the city to Asejire, on the Ibadan-Ife Expressway.

That stretch takes commuters from Lagos end to the hinterlands of other Southwestern states like Osun, Ondo,  Ekiti, Kogi, and even the Northern part of the country.

By that, the travellers would avoid passing through the congested Iwo Road axis of the city. The idea is to divert vehicular inflow from the interior of Ibadan by connecting vehicles coming from Lagos around the campus of the Technical University, Ibadan, to the Asejire junction. Good idea.

What is not good at all is that the construction company that the Ajimobi government awarded the contract to had a mandate to build the road within three years but manage it for 35 years.

Though the terms were clearly indicated, the company, ENL Consortium failed flatly to fulfill its mandate. By the terms of that agreement, the project was to be delivered in May 2020.

Trouble started for ENL when Governor Seyi Makinde paid an unscheduled visit to the construction site.

It was discovered that nothing was on ground, while the contractor claimed to have spent the two and a half years clearing the bush. As of late 2019, the contractor had not fixed a kilometre of the 32 km stretch.

Governor Makinde initially placed a ‘Stop Work’ order and asked the officials to come for talks in the office.

After the talks,  the governor asked the ENL to proceed and complete the project in line with the terms signed in 2017.

After the contract terms had expired in May 2020, the governor still left a window and when he visited early 2021, only about 3km of the road have been taken to asphaltic wearing course level ( first phase of asphalt laying ).

It was a clear sign that the contractors had abandoned the project.

Now at that juncture, what does the government do? With three kilometres of the road executed in three years, you need no soothsayer to know that ENL cannot fix the road in more than 20 years.

Do we expect that the government would re-award the same contract to the same company that failed to deliver on its mandate or that the government should completely shelve the idea of executing the Ibadan Circular Road Project?

Or, do we expect that the Makinde administration would do what is global standard practice in the circumstance by opening a new bid for the contract and re-award it to another company that has the competence to manage a job of that scale?

The choices before the governor are that simple and as anyone of good conscience would, the government elected to re-award the contract. The natural consequence of that decision is that some politicians of lesser virtues chose to politicize the situation with the accusation that Governor Makinde ‘terminated’ the contract because he is PDP and the previous administration that awarded it was of the APC.  That is a very silly thing to say, by the way. But let us even admit that that was true. Would the users of the road when completed be PDP members only, to say that the Governor is constructing the road for his party members? Of course, no. The pushers of this very toxic argument know the fact behind the matter themselves. They know that the immediate past administration did not monitor the contractors and that is the reason why the project failed! They merely deployed the means of propaganda to cover their shame.

Regardless, the Makinde government went beyond re-awarding the contract but re-negotiated the scope of the work and the amount to be spent on it.

First, the government decided to cover the entire stretch of the road rather than embark on piecemeal or segmented construction of 32 out of the 110 kilometers.  But the actual benefit in the new deal is that the 110km is being awarded at the agreed cost of N138 billion compared to N70 billion at which the previous administration awarded 32 kilometers. If we contrast the two deals, it will be clear that the Makinde administration has a better deal with a longer millage of the road to be constructed and a savings of about N100 billion! Our friends who are busy playing politics with such crucial infrastructure work will not draw attention to the shrewdness that Governor Makinde exhibited in re-negotiating the contract. They will choose to ignore the advantage that Oyo State has secured by the terms of this new contract because to them, politics is all about deceit. They have little or no appetite for moral rectitude on anything that improves the lots of the common man.

Rather than cover their faces in shame, they continue to go overdrive with their campaign of calumny by saying that the contractors that the state government eventually awarded the work to are a newly registered company.

The truth however is that the company that the contract is awarded to is a conglomerate which its parent companies decided to come together as one entity. This is a standard practice where individual companies come together to pool resources and manpower to undertake the execution of a particular project. It’s called Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV).

As the Makinde administration has re-awarded work on the Ibadan Circular Road project, the administration is gearing to another upending legacy of recording an achievement in two years where the previous APC government failed in eight years.

Balogun sent this piece from Ologuneru, Ibadan