Akwa Ibom State government has constructed 1,700 kilometres of road in the past three years, according to Mr. Ephraim Inyang-Eyen, Works Commissioner.
Inyang-eyen, who made this known during an online interview programme, tagged, “Footprints of Development”, anchored by the State Directorate of Brand Management, stated that some of the rehabilitated roads belong to the Federal Government.
According to him, 27 of the 31 local government areas have been covered, noting that the state has worked out modalities to touch the remaining four before the end of Governor Udom Emmanuel’s first tenure in office.
He said: “I want to say that the governor has done more roads than the Federal Government of Nigeria in the last three years. And I challenge anyone to come with a data contrary to what I have and we would be able to sit with him in public and add up the figures.
“I believe that every road in this state belongs to Akwa Ibom State government, previously constructed by the government of ex-Governor Godswill Akpabio. Federal Government has not paid a dime, and the one we are currently trying to complete such as the Uyo-Ikot Ekpene Road, which we took over from the previous administration, is solely funded by the state government.
“You can’t own a property like this. It’s like you giving birth to children; you say they are my sons, and the mother struggles to train the children single-handedly. When they are grown, they will not call you father.
“So, in Akwa Ibom State, virtually all our roads are constructed and maintained by the state, exclusively.
“There are too many of them to count. There is massive re-ordering in terms of infrastructure. If we sit down and painstakingly add up the roads, it would be more than 1,700 kilometres.
‘’Let’s look at the dual carriageway roads because the road structures that we have are in three segments. We have the dual carriageways that we called the trunk roads that open up the state, then we have what we call opening up of the rural areas, going to every local government areas to do a 10km, 15km, 20km roads in virtually all the local governments areas.
“Currently, 27 local government areas have been covered; remaining just four that are being worked on currently. And then we have what we call “the intervention”. If you go all over Uyo you will see them.
“They used to be forgotten areas; such are all over the place. But let’s start with the dual carriageways. If you go to the airport, we used to have a single-lane road leading to Oron, but today, the road has been transformed into a dual carriageway. When completed, the entire stretch from the airport to Okopedi to Uya-Oron will be 28 kilometres altogether.”
