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Simeon Mpamugoh
One of the major challenges of living in Somolu Local Government Area of Lagos State is flooding. Whenever it rains, residents and business owners have to grapple with flood, bad roads and abandoned vehicles parked indiscriminately on both sides of the road. One road that has continued to demand immediate attention and cause outrage is Bolaji Omupo Street. The street can be accessed through Salami Saidu on the way from Shipeolu to Bariga or from Apata through Alhaji Sherif Avenue.
Bolaji Omupo is less than 10 minutes’ drive from the local government secretariat. But whenever it rains, the flood leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the residents.
Dupe Awosoga, a company executive who has her business in the area, said the community had complained to the local government on many occasions but nothing was yet to be done.
“We believe the local government can mend the road so water can flow inside the drainage. They have the constitutional obligation to fix the road. Besides, they collect revenue from businesses around the local government. And some of the percentage of the taxes that we pay to the state goes to the local government.
“The bad road has seriously affected business in this area. I deal in products that have expiration date, hence I’m calling on the chairman to address the issue by using gravel or asphalt surfacing in order to make the road durable,” she said.
Jude Olaiya, a resident of the community, said some members of MFM Football Club that recently won laurels for the state live on the road; he wondered why government had refused to make the road passable.
The pathetic story of Mr. Ajikole, who was electrocuted last year, was narrated to the reporter.
“It rained that day, and flood came through a broken fence and flowed into the late Ajikole’s house and flooded his compound. When he was trying to switch off the light, he was electrocuted. Everywhere was flooded during the rain such that water found its way into the rooms,” the reporter was told.
Olaiya regretted that the current council chairman had not addressed the flooding in the area since he was sworn in. “That the flood claimed the life of a member of the community should be enough reason to fix the road, he noted.
“The chairman was quoted as saying recently that it was a state road. We expect that the chairman would have presented our case to the governor. In fact, at the last local government stakeholders’ meeting, it was resolved that those who have abandoned projects in their communities should write, drawing the attention of the council chairman to such projects so that he (chairman) could make a case on their behalf to the governor.
“I think the chairman should have done that by now but, sadly, most of them are not giving worthy representation of their various local governments. They are not doing the governor any favour by not briefing him properly on the state of the road architecture in their local governments. “
The reporter could not speak with the council chairman, Abdul-Hamed Salawu, as his secretary claimed he was busy. The reporter eventually spoke on the telephone to one engineer, Mr. Akin, in the works and infrastructure department.
His words: “The road surfacing has been done. In fact, the people that did it then was the state government. They had done the preliminaries of the surfacing only for them to stop. I don’t know what happened that the project was stopped. It is not right for us to jump at a project that is being done by the state government.
“On the issue of flood, it cannot come from a particular street. It starts from somewhere. Maybe there was a canal that was blocked. Bolaji Omupo cannot be flooded without canals. In fact, the street is on both sides of canals. The surfacing work was supposed to have begun, but I don’t know why it was stopped.
“The road has been compacted. It is not as if the road is bad. The flood must have come as a result of human activities from the nearby canal, maybe a blocked canal. The problem of that area does not start and end in Somolu. If we do our part about the canal, which is a state government job, it now runs across other local governments; if I clear my side and the next local government does same, it means we would all be safe from floods.”
When told that the local government’s functions included providing roads and public transportation so as to promote socio-economic development, he asked: “Which Constitution provides that local governments should work on canals? The canal is not only within the Somolu Local Government, it runs between four and five local governments and it is only the state government that can clear it. I cannot clear Somolu and move on to Bariga, Kosofe and so on. It is a core function of the state, not the local government. Ours is to work on secondary and tertiary drains. The state owns the primary drains, which are canals.
“The state government started from the drainage, which they have done, including the filling of the road. They have compacted the road, just for them to surface it, but they stopped. I came into the works and infrastructure department less then a year ago and I’m pretty sure that, maybe it is when the rain sets innd they realised that, if they continued, the whole place would be washed away, they stopped surfacing. And you cannot surface a road that is prone to flooding; the flood would wash everything away and it would amount to a waste of resources.
