18/03/2026
AN APPEAL TO THE GOVT TO FIX OUR ROADS.
1. We can create our own jobs (via self-employment), water (via wells and boreholes), power (via generators and solar panels), but not our own roads.
2. Bad roads mess up the best efforts at family planning. They decimate mostly the breadwinners on business trips and leave the surviving adults with more children than they planned for. A person with 3 children who inherits 9 orphans from 3 late siblings will have to drop them at an orphanage (and send the little money he can afford), rather than shorten his own life with stress or turn to crime while trying to satisfy their every need.
3. Even powerful people cannot totally avoid travelling by road (if only for short distances within the same town or between nearby towns) after flying for long distances. They too can fall prey to death on bad roads.
4. Good roads will not totally eliminate accidents (because of some overspeeding drivers) but they will be reduced and not be the government's fault.
5. Construction of good roads will attract more votes than cash transfers, scholarships, recruiting more workers and other goodies which can't go round everybody (and can be easily hijacked by middlemen).
6. Good roads reduce rural-urban migration by enabling residents of small towns to easily access banks, tertiary health facilities, etc in the cities near them. For example, GBONGAN (the headquarters of Ayedaade LGA of Osun State) does not have any bank and has only primary health centres (which cannot handle Caesarean sections, postpartum haemorrhage, etc) . Were the Ife-ibadan expressway in a good state, residents can easily travel 19 km to Ife or 21 km to Ikire (which is less than some intra-city distances) within 30 minutes. As things are, even people without any surgical history develop body pains on the road.
Since state and local government officials have to travel more frequently on roads in their territory than Federal Government officials, they sh
