Is the railway finally on track? (II)

When I wrote the first part of this piece last week I did not envision the barrage of reaction I got. In the first part of the piece I related how I cleared my misgivings about the capacity of the Nigerian Railway to deliver on promises. Eng. Usman Abubakar, The Chairman, Board of Directors, Nigerian Railway, helped to clear some of these misgivings when I met him. Thereafter, the many interactions I had with readers in the past few days, via the social media and phone conversations all confirm that Nigerians are keen to see the railway back on track.

A more discerning reader even suggested that the Nigerian Railways should particularly reverse the vertical north to south lines. I quote Mohammed Ahmed in some detail: ‘They (Nigerian Railways) can keep our hopes with good management. What I ask of them, as a national plan to reverse our colonial heritage on rail transportation. Take note that, what the Crown bequeathed is a railway system that looked to the coast only. It was only to transport raw materials from the hinterland to the coast for export. Not to integrate our areas economically. So, our railways should also run east-west, and diagonally across the country. For example all our cities should be connected by rail’.

Mohammed Ahmed and the handlers at the transport sector must be thinking in tandem, because the 25-year strategic vision for the railway, seem to take all that into consideration. This vision which has been implemented since 2002 adopted a systematic dual approach which would see to the rehabilitation of the entire existing, narrow-gauge line and the development of the new standard-gauge line.

Readers may recall that the old narrow-gauge line made its debut into this land two years before the country Nigeria was officially colonised. In 1898 the British colonial power started constructing the 193 km Lagos-Ibadan rail line which in later years, mostly during the colonial times, went straight up to Kano, Gusau and Nguru. Another line started from Port Harcourt going up to Jos, Bauchi and terminating in Maiduguri. By the time work on the narrow-gauge line was completed, probably in the 1960s at the Maiduguri Terminus, over 3000 kilometres of rail tracks have been laid all over the country. It was these lines that provided the most efficient, cheapest and most reliable mode of travel for the generality of the population and for traders moving their goods, be it kola nuts, cattle, dried fish, from one end of the country to the other. For us young persons of the time it was the most effective means of reaching our schools especially if the school was a long distance away.

It also afforded the government of the day the most efficient means to move bulk agricultural goods such as cocoa, groundnuts and cotton to the ports for exports to earn foreign exchange. Government also moved tin and columbite, minerals that were major foreign exchange earners from the Plateau to the ports by rail for export. Conversely manufactured goods from the colonial metropolis, then probably Manchester City and Liverpool in the United Kingdom, were returned to our towns in the hinterland via the same rail routes.

It is these same rail routes that our government is poised to reactivate by rehabilitating them and putting them to use, albeit in a much different manner. The government is resolute to do that by means of concession if it can get the right partner. It is with that in mind that the government engaged the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) to make a world-wide search in a bid to find such a partner with a view to enter into a public-private-partnership. Concession is a world-wide practice now especially where the government is hamstrung by lack of sufficient funds. It is said that concessions allows the government the best of both worlds, that of retaining the ownership of the infrastructure while allowing the private sector carry out the operating function for the good of the consuming public.

As of this time of writing, General Electric (GE) a consortium in partnership with other reputable companies in the field has been announced to be the selected preferred bidder for the concession of the West and East corridor of our rail network. The concession will involve the whole gamut of rehabilitation, financing and operation of the rail lines. The rehabilitation aspect has been ongoing and when completed we will see those lines back to life.

The standard gauge, on the other hand, is a more recent creation dating back to the 1930s. It was an improvement on the narrow-gauge and has lately been more associated with high speed rail, which in this country is more or less the newlyconstructed Abuja-Kaduna line. However I guess it is not generally known that the standard gauge has been in this country since 1986 when it was introduced in the botched attempt to build the Itakpe-AjaokutaWarri line. It is now been adopted for most of the new lines coming up in the near future: the Lagos-Kano and Lagos-Calabar lines. Already, Vice President Osibanjo has performed the ground breaking ceremony in March this year to herald the beginning of the construction of 193km Lagos-Ibadan rail line, which is the southern end of the LagosKano line. It is firmly promised that the finished product will be delivered in December 2018.

Now, it is planned that the standard gauge construction in the next few years will address the short comings of the former rail system that was bequeathed to us by the colonial masters which to all intent and purposes was for carrying raw materials to the ports. Many of the new lines will now run across the nation, diagonally or in whatever direction, convenient to the national needs. For example construction will soon start on the Lagos-Calabar line which will run all the way across the coastal areas with spurs to the SouthEast hinterland.

It is the feasibility studies that hold the promise that the railway culture is on its way back to our national life. Already the studies for LagosAbuja, Zaria-Sokoto-Birnin Konni (in Niger Republic), and Benin-OnitshaAbakaliki have been completed. Those ongoing include NguruDamaturu-Maiduguri-Gamboru, Kano-Katsina-Jibiya, Sokoto-JegaKontagora and others. When all these studies are tidied up and implemented, state capitals, other towns and villages will be connected such that my Maiduguri kinsmen can in the next few years venture to Lagos, Sokoto, Benin, Katsina, Calabar, all on the rail road. Many of us who lived in other countries know that this is possible. When I lived in Swansea City in the United Kingdom as a post-graduate student 38 years ago, I just needed to fly into Heathrow airport and from that point would not need any other mode of travel in the country but the railway.

So far the handlers in the Nigerian Railway Corporation have kept to their time lines in the planning process. We only pray that with timely release of funds they will deliver more on their promise. To do that, they will further need to engage their stakeholders and carry them along all the way. There are already rumblings in the railway union claiming that they are not part of the loop in the process particularly in the concession plans. Governments in the past have dealt a cavalier hand to workers in negotiations for concessions and outright sales of government properties. The sale of Nigerian Airways and the shabby manner the workers were treated still rankles. We hope the Nigerian Railway Corporation has learnt a lesson from that.