FG disagrees with Senate over plan to scrap FERMA

THE intention of the Senate to scrap the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) and replace it with Federal Roads Authority (FRA) was, on Monday, kicked against by the Federal Government.

The Senate had through a bill sponsored by its Chairman, Committee on Works, Senator Kabiru Gaya (APC Kano South), in October this year, resolved to repeal the Act establishing FERMA and replace it with FRA on alleged apparent lack of capacity of the road maintenance agency to handle the task of road management in the country going by deplorable state of roads over the years.

Gaya, in his lead debate on the bill, said FRA as a replacement for FERMA, would serve as a semi-autonomous road agency, which would be responsible for the professional management of federal roads in the country, involving planning, design, construction, rehabilitation and maintenance, thereby ending the duplication of functions between FERMA and the Highways Department of the Ministry of Works.

According to him, “the passage of the bill will bring permanent solution to the challenges of funding and management of roads in the country” and noted that the creation of the FRA was in line with the international road management practices as presently put in place in Ghana.

“The best practice around the world indicates that Nigeria cannot overcome its road infrastructure development challenges unless reforms are embarked upon to reposition the road sector and bring it in synchronies with its peers in the developed and developing nations of the world.”

But in his submission at the public hearing session on the move, the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Raji Fashola, cautioned the Senate over the move, warning that FERMA is already a brand on its own which should not be changed.

He said: “We welcome the idea of creating roads fund, we also welcome the idea of creating a maintenance agency but we think this will be details of the substance of the presentation that I will make. We think that all of the recommendations that have been made for maintenance should be embodied in the agency (FERMA) that government has already created.

“Repeal the existing FERMA law, re-enact it and put all the new things we want to create inside it instead of creating a new agency because FERMA was set up for maintenance in the very first place.

“It has acquired the name. It has acquired the brand. We can build on that brand instead of creating new brand. People who managed brands like this change their drinks, but they don’t change their names.”

He, however, concurred to the move by the Senate to reintroduce toll policy on federal highways as a way of raising funds for their maintenance.

“There is the need to institutionalise the maintenance of road assets but much more importantly there is the need for increased awareness and advocacy for users of our road assets that roads are not permanent assets.

“They are wearing assets. They are assets that diminish once we start to use them and so, from the day the road is opened, it begins to deteriorate.

“There has been a toll policy already in Nigeria since the Federal Highways Act in 1971 with deployed tools but for some reasons we stopped it. In other to attract the investment that will enable us achieve private capital inflows into infrastructure; two things, for me, are very instructive.

“The first is the cultural change from our existing mindset and our experience at sub-national and at national level,” he said.