Abuja Light Rail: Another Railway Project In Dire Straits?
LEADERSHIP catches up with London-based railway project management specialist and a key player in the Infrastructure Policy Commission of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Mr Rowland Ocholi Ataguba during his recent visit to Nigeria.
Let’s talk about your work with the Presidential Projects Assessment
Committee (PPAC). We understand that you were their top consultant in a crowded field and that your reports were adopted wholesale.
I don’t know about top consultant. We did our best given the constraints of budget and time.
You apparently turned in an excellent report on the Abuja Light Rail project as we understand that the government is implementing your recommendations. Your report talks about breach of Procurement Act, breach of Appropriation Act, breach of contract, breach of environmental Impact Assessment Act, contract inflation, negligence, incompetence, incoherent strategy, etc all committed by the government.
I believe that important lessons have been learned from the experience. Don’t forget that modern railways are a relatively new phenomenon in Nigeria and that there are huge institutional and human resource capacity deficiencies undermining the effective delivery of these types of projects. Sometimes we also have foreign consultants with limited experience of the Nigerian environment painting rosy feasibility pictures and telling us how PPP would do everything for us. We have a situation where no operator has been appointed for this landmark project and it is worrying that the project is progressing without one on board. We have a not too dissimilar situation with the National railways where the government says it plans to concession operations but there is hardly any basis for concessioning given that the enabling environment is just not there and a lot of money is already committed.
The contract for the Abuja Light Rail of over N100 billion was awarded five days to President Obasanjo’s departure from office without a feasibility study and concept design. Is that not significant?
I am not sure the number of days is material. What is important is if proper procedures were followed. The contract you refer to is for two of the six lines known as Lots 1 and 3 and the final feasibility study and conceptual designs were issued I believe in October 2009.
And were proper procedures followed?
Well, you have clearly read the report. Let us move on to what is helpful. PPAC was a fundamental departure from the past. For the first time, an incoming President did what an astute manager of resources would do. He carried out an inventory of all the projects he was inheriting. It has never been done before and what PPAC found was mind boggling. 12,000 outstanding projects, perhaps 30 per cent more, valued at N8 trillion that with the best will in the world, the government cannot fund. It also identified reasons why the projects, some as old as 30 years, have not been completed. It found issues with poor conceptualisation of projects, evidence of wide-scale institutional mediocrity, poor design and execution, deficiency of vision, avoidable cost over runs but most damning of all was the finding that projects were procurement driven and that corruption was rife in implementation. Governments historically seem in a hurry to award contracts without any clear thought for how they will be completed. This year, there are new capital projects that will be added to this ever growing uncompleted project inventory. Its simply unsustainable. I believe that the government has learned some lessons from PPAC which has informed the identification of priority projects that are being pursued under the SURE programme.
But most people have lost faith in the SURE programme because government says it cannot fund it.
There is a new mandate being awaited as a result of the reduction in the expected savings from the partial removal. I don’t think it is objective to see only negative things in what the government does. When it does good, it should be encouraged. It is possible that there were presentation issues in the subsidy debate. Even the most ardent critics agree that removing fuel subsidy could be a good thing. The divergence of opinion is in the timing and whether government is lean enough to ask others to tighten their belts. So it is really about different perspectives and the government’s capacity to stem the leakages in the system.
Talking about SURE-P on the railways, how is it supposed to ensure that railway projects are delivered because all we keep hearing are shifting dates for projects that were to be completed in 2009 that are still not completed in 2012?
I must say that the press has not helped much in this regard. I don’t think that there has been sufficient inquisition into some of these anomalies that you talk about and certain sections of the press seem content to act as a notice board for press releases without critical performance enquiry.
The SURE-P secretariat parades some highly intelligent technocrats drawn from diverse backgrounds under the leadership of the Special Adviser to the President on Technical Matters. We have interacted with them, so I know. The committee chairs are also highly reputable men known for their incorruptibility and results orientation. My only concern is about capacity and how quickly they can upscale because their remit, certainly under the previous mandate, is quite wide. This was one of the handicaps of PPAC in trying to do so much in a relatively short space of time. For instance, out of about 18 outstanding railway projects, PPAC was only able to review one of them.
I see SURE-P’s role as fundamental in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of priority projects, ensuring the projects are adequately funded and providing the President with an independent facility for assessing the performance of the MDAs on these critical projects so that timely intervention is possible where projects are failing. So they need to be independent of the implementing MDAs, avoid conflicts of interest and be adequately technically resourced to be effective.
The Abuja Light Rail project is a major component of the transport strategy for the FCT which is slowly grinding to a halt. It was due to start operating last year but is nowhere near ready. When will it be completed?
Well, you ask a very important question which I believe the government is best placed to answer. From my vantage position, I can tell you that there is still a lot of work to do. There are funding issues to contend with because the government is yet to receive the promised financial support from the Chinese government which I believe influenced the award of the contract for the fixed infrastructure to a Chinese contractor. There is the issue of an Operator which the government would like to be a concessionaire but I know for a fact that any concessionaire would be wary of the institutional framework within which he would have to operate. There is of course the matter of financial viability as well. In any case, we are only talking about two lines of six which are underway. The other four have yet to be procured. The design of the hub of the system known as Transportation Centre as well as the Interchange Centre is just being procured.
What needs to happen now for the operation of the first phase of the project to achieve fruition is for an Operator to be appointed as soon as possible, as this is a critical success factor. The first phase of the project will not succeed until trains run seamlessly on the lines.
There are also issues with too many procurement models proliferating in the project that may need rationalising. For instance, the project is a mix of Operations and Maintenance Concession for Lots 1 and 3 with the government building the fixed infrastructure, a BOT concession for the Transportation Centre with all its command and control systems which must necessarily integrate with the systems of the Operators, whereas the Automatic Fare Collection System is also on a separate concession. Lots 2, 4, 5 and 6 are supposed to be BOT concessions covering both the fixed infrastructure and the operations and maintenance. This means that you would require an Integrator to make certain that all the disparate systems work together and in harmony.
The strategic issues really concern the institutional framework. Under our present laws, only the NRC can own, operate and regulate railways in Nigeria. This needs to be changed but has not happened yet. Regulation for railway operations is still with the NRC and we need it to be independent especially if the NRC is going to be an Operator as you can’t be a player and referee at the same time. There is a bill that has languished in the National Assembly for years now known as the National Transport Commission Bill which provides for economic regulation of the transport sector. This is yet to be passed into law. If we are talking about concessioning, then we seriously need to look at our competition policy and strengthen it. We need a Competition Commission that will co-ordinate competition regulation across economic sectors with concurrent powers with the various sectoral regulators. Importantly for things to work as they should, we need robust institutions. So you are talking about government, the police, the legislature, the judiciary, the fire service, NEMA etc as they all have an input in determining whether we get the operational facilities that we need. The institutional framework issues put the government in a chicken and egg situation with this project.
This suggests that we are still light years away from seeing a functional Abuja Light Rail system. Should we then say that it is a project in dire straits?
Well, given that the project is listed among the priority projects in the earlier SURE-P mandate and the importance the Minister and the President attach to it, I would err on the side of optimism. My conjecture would be that it is a project whose time may have come but there is much work to do.
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