‘We are working to ensure Apo-Karshi road is completed’
Mrs. Victoria Imande, an architect, is the Director of the Satellite Towns Development Agency (STDA), in the FCT. In this interview, she speaks about the priority the agency is giving to projects in satellite towns. Excerpts:
What effort is your agency making to address the challenges of infrastructure in the satellite towns?
Well, since my assumption of duty in April last year, I met a lot of projects in satellite towns on ground and we are continuing with what we met on ground. For example, there are a lot of road projects; more than 50 that are ongoing, but work has slowed down due to lack of funds. But the FCT Minister, Muhammad Musa Bello, has started paying contractors and a lot of them have returned to site and they are working.
What is delaying completion of the road, started since 2009? the KujeGwagwalada which
Firstly, the entire stretch of the Kuje-Gwagwalada road was awarded to one company, Trans Engineering Limited, but at a point, their work performance was very slow and government did not see them meeting up to their targeted date of delivery. So government decided to award a part of the road, towards Kuje end, to Craine Builders and Engineering Limited and they completed it 100 per cent. Even the remaining portion, Trans Engineering Limited could not complete it to expectation and government decided to give it to Teleview International Limited. The remaining portion is 6.5 kilometres but part of it was asphalted with the payment given to Trans Engineering. We are expecting that the entire road project will be completed within six months, at most before the end of the year.
The Apo-Karshi road is one of the projects under the supervision of the Satellite Towns Development Agency (STDA), and has been ongoing for years. What is your agency doing to complete the project?
The Apo-Karshi road is 14 kilometres and eight to nine kilometres have been completed to asphalt level. Initially, the main obstacle was a big rock that was right in the middle of the road. That stretch is about 1.3 kilometres and the contractor was in the process of blasting the rock when he ran into the problem of the EFCC freezing his company’s account. So the contractor kept waiting for the account to be unblocked, and up till now we haven’t heard from him. But efforts are on, as it is one of the reasons the FCT minister visited the site and travelled the entire stretch of the road to see for himself those obstacles. Following that we are going to quickly resolve the issues. The aspiration of the minister is to see how the road project is completed within a short period.
Despite efforts by the FCT minister to re-introduce the monthly sanitation exercise across the six area councils on assumption office, there are heaps of refuse on some streets in satellite towns?
I can say the rate of accumulation of refuse is beyond what one anticipated. If you recall, there is a lot that has been said in the past about the heaps of refuse for example, along the Nyanya-Karshi axis. And you go one time and don’t see any refuse, if you go another time you will see refuse and then, what has been projected is that nothing has been done, but a lot has been done and is being done. We are just looking at improving on our strategies. The main problem has been the influx of people into the FCT.
Last week, we worked in Jikoyi, we worked tirelessly, up till Saturday, even right now as I speak people are still working there. We have rolled out waste bins as the population is increasing, so that we will bring our collection points closer to the people. Although some are responding well, some are not.
We have embarked on community sensitisation so that they will also learn habits that will enhance good hygiene.
However, one of the problems we face sometimes is that some people dump refuse where it is convenient for them. But along with other arms of the FCT, we are working on attitudinal change among residents of the territory. And while we are working on that, we are also working on collection points where waste is accumulated for many years.
Beside, we have sought collaboration with other partners and right now we are working in Bwari Area Council, Kubwa to be specific, as there are five notorious areas we have been working and we will keep working into April to make sure that we mop up all the waste that has constituted a lot of health and other problems.
In a nutshell, I am saying that work is going on in Gwagwalada with the collaboration of the area council, work is also going on in Kwali, work is going on in Kuje and AMAC, but our main problem is the influx of people.
Just when you sensitise a group of people and they know what they should be doing concerning collecting their waste and packing them properly and dumping them at the designated areas, there are new people that come and do the opposite.
So apart from increasing the number of collection points, we are also going from community to community to sensitize so that we have better results. We are also working with scavengers to help control the waste.