The Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) has said lack of funds is hampering efforts to repair dilapidated federal roads across the country.
The acting Managing Director of FERMA, Mr Godson Amos made this known in an interview on Sunday in Abuja.
He stressed funding was a challenge in the maintenance of the 36,000 kilometres of federal highways all year round.
Amos, however, disclosed plans to fill up potholes and intervene in repairing failed roads nationwide as the rainy season sets in are underway.
Speaking on how the agency would executive this intervention in the light of lack of funds, Amos said direct labour would be deployed by engaging skilled and unskilled youths in communities.
According to him, the intervention was necessitated because of the need to ameliorate the hardship and delays road users face daily.
He said he had gotten reports across the country of the deplorable condition of federal roads across the country, which is causing a lot of inconveniences to road users.
He added that these failures have hampered economic activities due to the inability of the people to freely move goods from one place to the other.
”The failures on the roads are mostly caused by the incessant rainfall being experienced in many parts of the country, which results in cutting off of roads, embankment and collapsing of many carriageway sections at many locations across the country.
“Also excessive traffic, overloading of vehicles coupled with the age of the roads are other factors that have contributed to the dilapidation of the federal roads.
“This hinders the free flow of traffic, causing colossal damages to vehicles, wastages of productive man hours and huge discomfort to road users.
“Our engineers in the Field Offices have already carried out a route condition survey of the Federal Roads and have identified all critical failures like road embankments, washout and failed carriageway section for the agency to take action,” Amos said.
He further said that appraisals have been made, including the assessment of works requirement, and estimation of resources like men, materials and machines that will be deployed to achieve the most cost-effective result.
Amos said in order to ensure that maximum results were achieved, the agency had designed a good monitoring mechanism for effective and efficient monitoring of all the projects nationwide deploying a management team for inspection.
TNG reports FERMA is an agency that was set up for the monitoring and maintenance of all federal roads in Nigeria.