Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State and former Governor Segun Osoba yesterday met with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, where they demanded the handover of Epe-Ijebu-Ode and Lagos-Ota-Abeokuta roads to Ogun and Lagos states respectively.
Abiodun, who spoke with journalists after their closed-door meeting with the President, said they were in the State House to also seek assistance in the area of agriculture.

The governor, who decried the inability to secure funding to rehabilitate the roads in the area even as it was necessary to aid the rapid development, said: “We have come to see the President to discuss on how he can use his fatherly position to give us the needed support that will allow us to further expedite action on achieving the vision of the state as we have encapsulated and dimensioned it.

“Our vision for the state is to provide a focus and qualitative governance while creating an enabling environment for a Public-Private Sector Partnership.

“We believe that is very fundamental to the economic growth of the state and individual prosperity of our people.

“So, we came and told the President that there are alternative routes apart from Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. The truth is that even if the construction is completed, that highway does not have the capability to accommodate the traffic that has now completely gone beyond what was anticipated.

“So, we must begin to look for alternative routes. What comes to mind is the Sagamu to Ikorodu Road, Epe to Ijebu-Ode Road and Lagos-Ota-Abeokuta Road. These are alternative roads that would allow us to efficiently move people from Ogun to Lagos and vice versa and the rest of the country.

“We have created the Ogun State Investment Promotion Agency. We have created Ogun State Public-Private Partnership Agency and we’ve created the Ogun State Business Environment Council. All these are agencies created to enable us to market the state better through the investment promotion agency.”

“Second, to ensure that contract between Ogun State and potential partners are not skewed in favour of either the state or those parties – that is the PPP office. And three, the business environment council – is that, once the partner is now in the state, you can call the partner, cut through the bureaucracy involved in applying for land, applying for the title, applying for building permits and so on and so forth. That becomes a one-stop-shop.

“To achieve all these, we need to have the right infrastructure.

“So, we came to the President to help us in allowing the Federal Ministry of Works to transfer these roads to us. We would be commercialising them – they are commercial roads anyway.

“The Sagamu to Ikorodu Road was the old Ibadan Road. It is on that road that we have the biggest NNPC depot. There are so many factories on that road and most of these factories have gone moribund. Truck drivers are also refusing to go and load on that road.

“If that road is transferred to both Lagos and Ogun states, we will commercialise it after we must have rehabilitated, constructed and upgraded it.”