Hon Karimi Sunday Steve, a two time House of Representatives member, has called on the Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola, to with immediate effect call to order the contractors handling the repairs of Gwagwalada-Lokoja portion of the Abuja-Lokoja road, over alleged dereliction of duty.
According to Karimi, commuters traveling on that road have been facing hardship since the beginning of the first quarter of this year lasting three months.
The former federal lawmaker is particularly miffed that a journey that normally takes two hours sometimes now lasts for 14 hours “because of negligence on the part of the contractors and lack of effective supervision on the part of the ministry”.
He noted that whereas the repairs causing traffic gridlock should have been handled swiftly and mostly at night, “they are lazily pretending to be working, but are stagnant due to no other reason than lack of effective planning, thereby causing untold hardship for the people plying the road”.
He added, “Some even have lost their lives due to unnecessary accidents. During this festive period, the Minister needs to move swiftly to avoid the ugly experiences of the last few months. The major problems are on the Gwagwalada and Lokoja end, where reconstruction work has been ongoing for months, without good progress”.
“My investigations revealed that workers resumed to site at 10am and close for work at 4pm. For such an important work on such an important trunk ‘A’ road, I consider the attitude of the contractors as wilful dereliction of duty and irresponsible,” he said.
