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Tag: Railway

  • Feature: 10 Priority areas to boost the Nigerian Economy

    Feature: 10 Priority areas to boost the Nigerian Economy

    by Ayo Akinfe

    Should Bola Tinubu seek $100bn in international loans and spend it on the following ten priority areas to boost the Nigerian economy?

    [1] Security
    Provide funding for geo-political zone, state or local government security outfits to combat the current insecurity menace. Our current security architecture is wholly inadequate

    [2] Restructuring
    No matter how you cut it, Nigeria is going nowhere unless we end our dependence on crude oil and get the states to start acting as federating units. Our states need help to stand on their own two feet

    [3] Railway
    Nigeria is one huge car park. We need to move about 80% of our freight and passengers off the road and on to rail. All of our 774 local government areas need to be part of a national railway network

    [4] Refineries
    How can all three of our national refineries have broken down at the same time? Dangote’s refinery will ameliorate this problem but if we want a surplus of petroleum products to export, we need the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries working too

    [5] Steel
    No country will ever become self-reliant without a domestic steel capability. We need to get the Ajaokuta, Aladja and Osogbo steel mills up and running to full capacity

    [6] Manufacturing
    Every single one of our 774 local government areas must have at least one industrial estate. We will get nowhere with the current dependence on imports. Nigeria is simply not productive enough as a nation

    [7] Low-cost housing estates
    We have a growing population and lack a housing programme to accommodate our people. Common sense will tell anyone that this is not sustainable

    [8] Coastal wind farms
    Nigeria has 853km of Atlantic coastline. I cannot believe that we do not have a Calabar to Badagry wind farm to generate clean energy

    [9] Agro-processing
    We are the world’s leading producer of cassava, yam, kolanuts, Shea nuts, etc and are among the top 10 producers of cocoa, cashew, coconuts, palm oil, neem, millet, sorghum, groundnuts, pineapples, papaya, bamboo, rubber, etc. Nigeria needs to start processing all these products

    [10] Launching a national carrier
    European airlines have been ripping us off for ages, it is time for a fightback. Nigeria desperately needs an airline that can compete with the likes of BA, Virgin Atlantic, KLM, Emirates, Lufthansa, etc

  • Feature: Nigeria needs Frieght Railway programme to support Manufacturing

    Feature: Nigeria needs Frieght Railway programme to support Manufacturing

    By Ayo Akinfe

    I hope Tinubu realises that to get manufacturing going he needs to have an effective freight railway programme which is separate from the national railway passenger plan

    [1] On a daily basis, Nigeria witnesses horrific accidents on her roads, many of them involving trailers. Our transport policy has got to be based on moving freight off the road and on to rail to help cut such deaths

    [2] No country anywhere on earth has ever industrialised without a modern and efficient railway service. Nigeria’s lack of a modern railway network is a mirror reflection of how unserious we are when it comes to manufacturing

    [3] Without a modern, fast, efficient and reliable nationwide railway network, you cannot move thousands of tonnes of steel, bitumen, crude oil, cement, granite, etc around the country. They say the railways are the first signs of industrialisation

    [4] In an economy like Nigeria where we are a major agricultural producer but most of our food is grown by smallholders in rural areas, we will never get this sector fully running until we can get produce from farm to factory efficiently and swiftly. Something like a third of all Nigerian food production goes to waste due to poor storage, refrigeration and transportation facilities

    [5] Just look at the state of our rural roads and you can see where the problem with Nigerian agriculture lies. If you are a tomato farmer, how do you get your produce to a processing plant in Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, Enugu or Port Harcourt in perfect condition when the pot holes leading from your farm are four feet deep? Having a good road that leads from your farm to your local government headquarters and then a railway service from there to the state capital is the way out

    [7] There are 774 local government areas in Nigeria with at least 700 of them involved in agriculture in one way or the other. Unless they are linked together by a railway network that includes refrigerated carriages, mobile abattoirs, mobile fruit processors, on-the-move seed crushing plants and mobile trailers that can roll off upon arrival in big cities, we will get nowhere with food processing

    [7] Apart from reducing accidents and boosting efficiency, just think of the way a roll-on, roll-off railway trailer service will save the wear on tear on our roads. It will also extend the lives of the trailers themselves because they will be driving less

    [8] In India, they have managed to get one of these roll-on, roll-off services running in the west of the country. When the British left in 1947, they did not build a railway line in western India because of the monsoon rains, so in 1990, the Indians decided to build one themselves. In January 1997, they opened the Mumbai to Goa Western Indian line. This cargo service is what pays for the running of the service

    [9] In India, the man charged with building the western railway line told the government he does not want them anywhere near the project. He set up an independent agency and staffed it with young engineers and local people. Within seven years the project was delivered on schedule and the costs did not balloon out of control

    [10] Maybe what Nigeria needs is an independent public works agency tasked with addressing the twin problems of agriculture and transport together. This agency could focus on a national railway network linking all 774 local government areas, freeing up state and local governments to focus on rural and inter-city roads

  • Feature: What Buhari needs to incorporate in His New Year Speech

    Feature: What Buhari needs to incorporate in His New Year Speech

    By Ayo Akinfe

    look forward to President Buhari saving his best for last and giving us this New Year’s Day speech as his departing gift to Nigerians

    [1] We will boost generated electricity from the current 7,000MW to South Africa’s 50,000MW

    [2] This government will increase the kilometres of tarred roads from the current 200,000km to South Africa’s 750,000km

    [3] Between now and when we leave office, we will increase the length of our railway network from the current 4,000km to Pakistan’s 8,000km

    [4] By May 2023, we will increase our literacy rate from the current 60% to Brazil’s 91.7%

    [5] This government will boost steel production from the current zero level to Egypt’s 7m tonnes

    [6] We will increase sugar production from the current 37,500 tonnes to the 762,000 tonnes of Sudan

    [7] This government will increase annual rice production from the current 7m tonnes tonnes to Thailand’s 32m tonnes

    [8] We will boost palm oil production from the current 1.4m tonnes to Malaysia’s 19m tonnes

    [9] Nigeria will increase her natural rubber production from the current 150,000 tonnes to India’s 900,000 tonnes

    [10] We will set ourselves the long term goal of increasing the ratio of hospital beds from the current 0.5 per 1,000 people to the Turkish level of 2.7 per 1,000 people

    Nigeria is supposed to be a Mint country made up of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey and a member of the D8 leading developing eight countries. The D8 is made up of Iran, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt and Nigeria, so our standards should always match up.

    At the moment, we are lagging behind in too many areas. As you can see, I have not compared Nigeria with any industrial giant like Germany, Japan, France or the UK but I do not think it is too much to ask that we keep up with other developing nations.