Ekiti State Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project (RAAMP) is working on 1,000 kilometres of rural roads of the 8,103.32km of such roads in the state.
The state project coordinator of RAAMP, Hon. Sunday Adunmo, disclosed this during a chat with journalists.
He said the state’s intervention on federal roads had reduced the number of federal roads in the state from a total of 376.8 km to 342.5 km.
Adunmo, who stated this during a chat with journalists in Ado Ekiti, added that there are a total of 862.2km of state roads and 1,301.1km of urban roads designed for market development and improvement on ordinary untarred roads for farmers to have access through RAAMP.
He said, “We have chosen backlog maintenance for 250 km of roads, out of which 131.5 km are being worked on presently and have been awarded. The first of the three phases is 65.15 km. Some are state roads, but the state government has few resources to fix all, hence RAAMP intervention.
“On spot improvement alone, we have 450 km already designed, which is the next phase to be awarded after completing the 250 backlog maintenance”.
On the impact of the constructed roads on food production in Ekiti, Adunmo said, “Since we started constructing the roads, new markets are springing up, access to bring farm produce to the market, farming is becoming more attractive to the people, connectivity of farms to urban roads, linking urban roads to the state roads and state roads to the federal roads, it safes farmer a lot of time getting their goods to the market and security challenges they are facing is reducing drastically”.
He, however, traced the deplorable state of federal roads in Ekiti State to past neglect by the federal government and failure to provide timely and comprehensive intervention on most of the streets, saying that they were originally designed for vehicles not exceeding 20 tonnes capacity but are now plied by articulated vehicles with over 60 tonnes capacity.
He said the state government is incapable of taking over road construction since the federal government had warned that it would not reimburse states which carry out construction works on federal roads.
According to him, the state government decided to construct alternative routes pending the construction of federal roads.
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