State corruption and capacity in Nigeria
Imnakoya, a Nigerian-American who lives in Minnesota and blogs at Grandiose Parlor pointed out a video on a light rail project in Lagos.This is a case study in state capacity and corruption.
While looking at that video, I found another about the Obasanjo administration's Nigerian Railway Modernization Project.
It turns out that the Obasanjo-era project was one of a long line of railroad development projects, none of which have amounted to much in spite of spending millions of naria. Now, the Yar'Adua administration is proposing a new rail project.
One summary of the history of rail development projects appeared on the Nigerians in America web site, History of Nigeria's railroad development.
More recently, the Daily Trust reported last April on the sorry history of railroad development schemes in Nigeria.
Railway Going Nowhere Fast
Everything about the scenery tells you this is a railway station. There is a rail track snaking into the distance towards the ever-busy roads of the bustling commercial city of Kano where it cuts on its journey to surrounding cities and towns where once it facilitated the movements of bales of cotton and bags of groundnuts from the great pyramids during the period of the agricultural boom. There is a control tower and scattered carcasses of what is left of former trains and coaches.
But there are no passengers or goods waiting to make the journey through the valleys and slopes that trail several hundred kilometers to the sea port in Lagos with stoppages at Kaduna, Port Harcourt and several towns and cities on the way...
The railway sector has paid dearly for this recklessness. The rail that used to carry three million tonnes of freight in 1964 now carries less than 10,000 tonnes per annum. Not only that, passengers have declined from 11 million as obtained in 1964 to about one million in 2003 at a period where the national population has almost doubled...
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Labels: capacity, corruption, Nigeria
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:31 AM
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