BY Ayodele Oluwafemi
Commuters plying the Ado-Ilawe expressway in Ekiti state are stranded after a portion of the road caved in on Wednesday morning.
The road recently became an alternative route for commuters, including residents of the state, due to the deplorable state of the Akure-Ado expressway.
Asiwaju Oladimeji, a resident of the state, accused the federal government of abandoning federal roads in Ekiti.
Oladimeji said the federal government frustrated the funding secured by the state government from the African Development Bank (AfDB) to construct federal roads.
“The caving in of the Ado-Ilawe road happened this morning. This is the road people usually follow to avoid some of the bad portions of Akure-Ado road. Now the road has become bad too,” he said.
“We have some major roads connecting to Ekiti. At the moment they are in a terrible state. The Ado-Akure road is a no-go area, the Ero/Aramokun/Igede roads are bad and many other federal roads in Ekiti are in deplorable condition.
“Right now all the federal roads that exit Ekiti to Akure, Ibadan, Lagos and other states are in total collapse. Unfortunately, these are federal roads.
“There is a problem with federal roads in Ekiti. We have been abandoned by the federal government.”
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In June 2019, the Ekiti state government announced that AfDB had expressed readiness to provide financial support for the upgrade of infrastructure in the state, including fixing the Ado Ekiti-Akure road.
In June 2022, Kayode Fayemi, governor of Ekiti, said the federal government refused to grant approval for the dualisation of the expressway.
“I have spent the last three years on the subject of this road. I finally got them to award the dualisation in November 2019 at the cost of N30 billion. To date, the contractor has only received N2 billion,” Fayemi had said.
“I then got money from the AfDB for the road through Akinwumi Adesina (AfDB president), and the federal government refused to cede the road to Ondo and Ekiti states and threatened us there will be no refund if we went ahead and tampered with their road.”
Speaking when he visited the area later on Wednesday, Fayemi described the damage as an effect of climate change, adding that preliminary repairs would be carried out, while a survey would be done for long-term solution.
“This is another evidence why we must take climate change very seriously,” the governor said.
“When I heard of it this morning, I even thought it was the other failed portion which we had already contracted out to the original contractor that was affected.
“But it turned out that it is another part of the road that has now failed. This is a state road. We will take some preliminary measures to restore the road to some reasonable use, but we don’t want to be precipitated about our approach to dealing with this problem.
“We are going to get our engineers in the ministry of works, to work with the contractor, to do a geotechnical survey of the area affected.
“We will do a survey of at least 500 meters around this entire axis so that we know what is happening underneath the asphalted area in order to deal with it effectively.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated after the visit of the governor to the area.
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