With their renewed mandate to repair and maintain all roads in the state, the management of the Lagos State Public Works Corporation (LSPWC) has been advised to carry the lawmakers in the state along in their projects.
According to the Chairman of the Lagos State House of Assembly Committee on Works and Infrastructure, Hon. Abiodun Tobun, it is wrong to do projects that affect few individuals instead of the ones that affect thousands or millions of people.
In his speech during a familiarisation tour to the office of the corporation in Ojodu Area of the state recently by the committee, Hon. Tobun stated that the inputs of the representatives of the people should be captured in whatever the corporation does, adding that with this, the lawmakers would be part of the projects, look at the ones that would affect the people most and that the projects would be more pronounced.
“Our mission here is not too cumbersome, we want to familiarise ourselves with you and know more about what you do. LSPWC is central to the development of Lagos State on infrastructure renewal and roads maintenance.
“Lagos State is the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria and continuous maintenance of our roads would show how responsible our government is. Our roads should be maintained and I believe that this is the core duty of the corporation,” he said.
Tobun then asked the Special Adviser/CEO of the corporation, Engineer Ayotunde Sodehinde to let the committee know the staff strength of the corporation, their sub-staff and the ‘gangs’ they use for their operations.
Earlier in his speech during the visit, Engineer Sodehinde said that the corporation was established in 1980 with a wider coverage as it was meant to build toilets, bus stops, roads amongst others to do what the British Municipal Corporation is doing.
Sodehinde however, added that the corporation has since been restricted to repairing and maintaining roads, while it also builds roads from the scratch.
“We have done so many jobs since I came around in 2015. We do direct labour and we used to outsource projects, but the Governor later directed that we should face direct labour, while outsourcing is left for the state Ministry of Works and Infrastructure,” he said.
The Special Adviser stressed that the staff of the corporation work on sites both day and night as he said that they usually face a lot of disturbance during the day, but that they have full concentration at night.
On the number of staffers in the corporation, he said that they have 120 staff, and 281 project staff, who are paid N20,000 each monthly with monitoring officers and mystery monitoring officers, who monitor the monitoring officers.
He said that there is a general monitoring officer and that the mystery monitoring officers are not known to the monitoring officers.
“The mystery monitoring officers tell us everything that go on at the sites. Our roads are easily damaged by water because our drainages are blocked. We don’t wait for the Ministry of the Environment on this, so we have our drainage clearing gangs about 70 of them with nine men in each gang,” he said.
On the efforts being made to employ hardworking project staff, he said that a recommendation has been made to the Governor on this and that it would be done in due course.
Other lawmakers that took part in the visit were Hon. Oluyinka Ogundimu, Hon. Olanrewaju Ogunyemi, Hon. Rasheed Makinde and Hon. Fatai Mojeed.
