Yuletide: Roads Everywhere None to Use

Christmas is finally upon us. It is when Christendom commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world. It is also the time of the year when there are frenetic activities all over the place; a time that witnesses mass movement of people, especially Christians, who use the period to travel home to reunite with their kith and kin.

Thus it is always a much anticipated period. But in Anambra State, the joys of this period may be hampered by the poor state of the roads which invariably causes traffic gridlocks.

For some time now, Anambra has been touted as the state with the best road network in the entire country. While that may still be the case, as the roads are still there, it must be noted however that most of those roads have almost collapsed, and coupled with the police barricades across the state, a journey that takes a few minutes now takes up to an hour or more. This is apart from road accidents caused by the collapsed roads.

In times past, the Anambra State Government used to carry out palliative repairs on roads ahead of the yuletide in order to ensure free traffic flow but this time no such thing has happened and it appears as though the government has left the people to their own devices.

Last week members of the Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, Anambra State Command, were the ones who embarked on the sand filling of some portions of bad roads in the capital city. According to the Sector Commander, Adeoye Irelewuyi, it was their contribution towards ensuring free traffic flow across the state.

When the FRSC begins to do the work which is expected of the state government through the concerned ministry, then something must be very wrong indeed.

A drive round most the roads in the state will reveal that their dilapidation did not start now but a long time ago. But failure to address the situation made them to deteriorate to this point.

Now that nothing has been done by the government to fix the roads, the road users should expect tough times on the road during this period as bad roads usually trigger traffic jams. It is regrettable that things have been left to become this bad and thus condemning road users to suffer avoidable hardship.

Being that things have become the way they are, we implore members of the public to please avoid doing anything that will worsen the situation like forming double or triple lines during traffic jams or driving against traffic.

They should cooperate with officials of the FRSC to ensure free traffic flow. We just have to make the most of the difficult situation and hope that next time, government would do the needful.

We wish Anambra people a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.