Gowon estate residents expend N1m on road

Gowon Estate Community Development Association on Friday said that it had spent about one million naira to fix roads in the estate. The estate is located at Ipaja, near Lagos.
The Chairman of the association, Mr Nathaniel Okoro, said 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.
Okoro said 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 buy 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 have 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 on the roads.
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.
According to him, the situation has been affecting the socio-economic activities of residents.
He said that the deplorable state of the roads had also been increasing maintenance cost of vehicles.
Also speaking, Mr 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.
Abaniwonda 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,’’ Mr Nicholas Ohabuenyi, a spare parts dealer added.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of Mosan Okunola Council, Mr Abiodun Mafe, said that the council did not neglect the estate deliberately.
He said that most residents of the estate were paying tenement rates to the FHA, instead of paying to the Lagos State Government.
“There are perceptions in the mind of the people that the fund in the Local Government is too enormous, they have the mindset that we deliberately abandon them, which is not true.
“The estate is being controlled by FHA which collects rates, the only rate that we collect in the estate is trade permit and we maintain their entire environment and keep it tidy.
“We have not shied away from our responsibility we are doing what the laws permit us to do with available resources.
“We do not have enough resources to maintain entire roads and FHA is the architect of the dilapidation of the estate because all revenues go to them,’’ the chairman said.
Mafe appealed to the residents to pay tenement rates to the state by virtue of the Land Use Act, which he said, gave the state the custodian of the land.
The LG boss also urged the FHA to release revenues generated from the estate to maintain infrastructure and make it habitable for people.
“The trade permit rate payable to the council is used to maintain some roads, clean the environment and cart away refuse.