THE Federal Government has vowed to reduce the current high rate of accidents on Nigeria’s high ways by 30 per cent by the end of this year.
A recent World Health Organisation’s report indicated that “Nigeria loses 162 persons per 100,000 populations annually to road accidents while over 1.3 million people worldwide are killed and 50 million injured annually in road accidents.
“This figure is projected to rise by 65 per cent, if nothing is done.”
The Minister of works, Mike Onolememen, however, while giving his key performance indicators on the 2012 budget at the Presidential Villa on Thursday, said government was working hard to reverse the trend in Nigeria.
He said government would be achieving this by reducing cost of vehicle maintenance by 25 per cent and reducing travel time between place of origin and destination by as much as 30 per cent.
“We will look at the vehicle with which to drive some of these projects to completion bearing in mind that our key performance indicators in this sector are to achieve reduced travel time for Nigerians between origin and destination by 30 per cent.
“We will reduce cost of maintaining vehicles by at least 25 per cent as a result of improved driving surfaces on our roads. And of course reduce fatality incidence and accidents rates on our roads by as much as 30 per cent.
“These are our key performance indicators.”
On the 2012 budget, the minister said his ministry had achieved 93 per cent performance from the N44 billion so far released to it in the 2012 budget.
He said his ministry had completed 12 roads in the 2012 budget while 156 were being executed, adding that 350 engineers were recruited to effectively drive ongoing projects.
“ Basically, I want to state that the Federal Ministry of Works has received about N44 billion out of that, we have recorded a performance of about 93 per cent.
“Specifically, in the Highways Department, about N38 billion has been released and we have expended about N37 billion on projects and programmes which represent about 96 per cent performance under the Highways Department. ”
The ministry was allocated N149.2 billion as its capital budget and N31.6 billion as recurrent in 2012.
The works minister had earlier briefed President Jonathan on some of the key achievements of the ministry.