Babatunde Fashola’s celebration

Last Monday, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing (PWH), offered a public evaluation of the performance of his Ministry in the past three years He gave his work an excellent grade. “I am proud and happy to report that we have walked our talk, and we have delivered visible results and recorded qualitative progress,” he declared.

“With regard to power, we have improved on what we met, by increasing generation from 4000 MW to 7000 MW, transmission from 5000 MW to 7000 MW and distribution from 2690 MW to 5,222 MW,” he said.

On roads, the Minister declared: “Our progress report on public works relating to roads and bridges also confirms that we have fulfilled our promise.”

He said thousands of jobs previously lost in the sector have been recovered through “an expansive infrastructure spending that saw works budget grow from N18.132b in 2015 to N394b in 2018.”

On housing, the Minister drew attention to public works at the Federal Secretariats in Zamfara, Bayelsa, Nasarawa and Ekiti, and at the Zik Mausoleum in Onitsha which, according to him, “has now been practically completed.”

In the pilot National Housing Programme, he said that construction is going on nationwide in 34 states, with no fewer than 1,000 people not counting the staff of contractors, being employed on each site.

As one who publicly proposed a communication strategy to the government in its early days in 2015-at a time I thought it would be philosophically, strategically and substantially different-I commend Fashola for his report. It is the right direction for the government, and I encourage him, through his junior Ministers and other senior officials, to report more frequently. In such a large Ministry, there is a lot to keep an eye on, and frequency in reporting does accountability a world of good.

But it is also a different world, and it would be helpful to see an office with the size and complexity of PWH report with more numbers, statistics, pictures, videos and infographics, with most of those made available on its website.

That said, Fashola’s report seemed to be more of a campaign document than a genuine effort to justify the vast funds the Ministry is now receiving: N394 billion in 2018.

Rather than a statement crafted as a testimony to ambition, performance or diligence, the statement was littered and peppered with tell-tale sloganeering language aimed at propping up President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election campaign. Samples:

“This is progress that we must move forward by consolidating on our mandate of change. We cannot go back…That journey used to take a whole day before President Buhari was elected and sometimes people slept on the Road…We cannot go back to that era. We are determined to move forward…These are some of the most vulnerable people for whom President Buhari has delivered…We cannot go back to the bottom of the mountain when the plateau is now within reach.”

In place of far more persuasive and professional language such as: “completed,” “commissioned” and “declared open,” Fashola spoke of “advanced state of procurement… receiving attention…being undertaken… practically completed.” On some projects, he had “progress…continues,” and “sections… completed.”

The truth is that when the Minister reports sections of key roads “have been completed,” or that “progress of works continues,” he is using the same language as previous governments. In other words, motion, not necessarily movement; articulation, not achievement. Here is an illustration: my December 2013 report on the perennial work on the BeninSagamu Road, into which hundreds of billions of Naira has been sunk in the past two decades.

But the Minister classified that road under “progress…continues.” I checked with several users last week and they were not happy; every government’s report is the same each year almost throughout the country. It is significant that government officials and their families choose to fly to avoid the carnage, caused by their poor condition. There is also the security concern, with travelers getting ambushed by a variety of criminals.

It is no surprise that Fashola’s language has been used for years by his predecessors, such as Mike Onolememen, Diezani AllisonMadueke, Adeseye Ogunlewe, and Anthony “Mr. Fix-It” Anenih, each of whom saw significant sums of money for the project.

We may even go back a little further to Major General Abdulkarim Adisa, who ran the Ministry under Sani Abacha. It is ironic that Adisa died of a major road crash just a few years ago in 2005.

Fifteen years after that, we are still not prioritizing roads or hospitals. In Fashola’s report, I did not hear of any visionary, first class highways or the transformation of old ones into the modern age. Fashola did not mention the Airport Road in Lagos that Governor Akinwunmi Ambode took it upon his government last year to restructure into a modern, 10-lane highway despite its being set for completion in the next few weeks.

Sadly, key federal highways are still being designed as dual carriageways despite Nigeria outliving such templates years ago. The quality of these roads is perpetually poor as we are always patching and re-painting, just as we did last year and the year before that, and just as governments before did.

Hardly any surprise then, that with Christmas approaching, Fashola spoke of “53 critical roads” flagged for “intervention… while construction is going on…” I decode that as intervention within intervention. In other words, despite his claims, at least 53 federal roads remain unsafe Nigerian roads.

Speaking of inaccuracies, the Minister bragged about intervention works in internal roads of 14 federal universities, the 14th of which he listed as “University College Ibadan.” But there is no such institution in Nigeria and none has existed since 1948. If the Ministry does not know where it alleges it is working, how do we know it is working there and how can we trust the quality of that work? How do we develop confidence in the Minister’s other claims we are not familiar with?

I am not trying to deny PWH credit for its efforts. This is merely a reminder that the signpost for which the people voted in the Buhari government was change. It was not handed power to colour and disinfect, rinse and repeat. Nigerians wanted action, alias change, not excuses or explanations. There is no change.

Think about it: Uganda Airlines, which was announced this year, is about to take off as planned; Kenya Airways last month commenced a 15-hour non-stop Nairobi-New York service.

Conversely, our Nigeria Air announcement collapsed within months, and power continues to fail at our airports, as it did in Lagos last Tuesday.

The Lagos-Calabar Rail, which was supposed to have gone into operations before the end of this year, has become a joke, and only last week, General Electric pulled out of a long-term $2 billion concession deal with Nigerian that was agreed only last year.

In other words, change has been in the other direction. Nobody can colour or paint that away. • sonala.olumhense@gmail.com • @SonalaOlumhense