19th July, 2014
Gowon Estate Community Development Association on Friday said that it had spent about one million naira to fix roads in the estate located at Ipaja in Lagos.
The Chairman of the association, Mr Nathaniel Okoro, told NAN in Lagos that the amount was expended in the first quarter of this year.
He noted that the deplorable condition of roads in the estate, prompted residents to put resources together to repair the roads, adding that, the roads had become an eye-sore and death-trap for residents.
“All the roads in the Gowon Estate have collapsed. There is hardly any motorable road in the estate. The situation is getting worse every raining season; it gets worse than the year before and the problem of the residents increase every year.
“We bought gravel, laterite and do manual labour by ourselves to fix the roads and that is the only reason why we can go out and come in. We raised about one million naira in June to fix some roads and that is the trend over the years.”
According to him, the estate, built during FESTAC 77, has not witnessed any maintenance. He said that if government should delay further, it would take a caterpillar to drive through the roads because of erosion.
The chairman lamented that efforts made annually to seek help from the Mosan Okunola Local Council Development Area and the Lagos State Government had yielded no result.
He said that the council and the government had been dodging the maintenance of the estate on the ground that the estate was a Federal Government property.
Okoro, however, argued that both the local and state governments had no excuse for not fixing the roads because civil servants in the estate paid taxes to the state.
Abayomi Abaniwonda, a bar owner in the estate, said that half of the entire road network in the estate had been washed away by flood. He said that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) had failed in its duties.
“The estate’s roads are of serious concern to tax-paying residents, when it rains you can’t move unless with a-four-wheel vehicle,” Nicholas Ohabuenyi, a spare parts dealer added.