ExpdonaLoaded.blogspot.com (+2348097205188): Expdonaloaded News; Bad road: Help wipe out our tears, Enugu community begs Ugwuanyi

Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Expdonaloaded News; Bad road: Help wipe out our tears, Enugu community begs Ugwuanyi

For the people of Edem in Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu State, life is not the same again as they are living in perpetual agony. Their roads have become death traps and hellish. Their only hope now, however, is that an Nsukka man is at the helm of affairs in the state as they are united in grief that previous administrations in the state abandoned them.
“Now that Gburugburu, an Nsukka man is there, we are certain he will wipe our tears of sorrow”, they hoped. Edem is one of the largest towns that make up Nsukka LGA with three autonomous communities. With over 40 villages, the town could not boast of any accessible road, making the natives to be locked in their communities. When Oriental News visited the area, it was discovered that beneath this “abandoned empire” lies numerous natural resources and farm produce which according to the villagers, “are continuously wasted as there are no good roads to convey them to the markets”. One of the villagers, Mr Anene Omeje, described one of the villages in Edem, Egu-Amegu as the food basket of Enugu State. “In Egu-Amegu, there are numerous crops being produced in large quantity, ranging from cassava to pineapple, but because there is no road to evacuate the crops harvested there to the market, very many of the farm produce end up being wasted,” he said. Indeed, a good number of the community members had claimed that if provided with good roads, Edem could go a long way in bringing Enugu State to a positive limelight using its large number of farm produce got from the area. Worse still, the people who are mainly farmers complained that besides very few small markets in the town, there exists no other market where they could sell their farm produce to outsiders. They claimed that while it seemed they have been “forgotten by previous administrations in the state”, various government officials had, in the past, promised to repair the roads for them. “When it is time for election, you see them coming to seek for our votes because of our very large population, but once they win the elections, you won’t see their back anymore”, they regretted. In a cross section of interviews with the villagers, they lamented that the dilapidated nature of the roads in the town has made life miserable for them, adding that with each passing day, they pray to God to send succour to them from the government. “At least now that an Nsukka man is the governor, we believe he will be in a better position to understand our plight”, they said. One of the villagers, Mr Jonah Asogwa, pointed out that as part of measures to ease their sufferings, the youths in the communities sometimes embarked on communal projects on the roads to make them better. According to him, “why the roads are this bad is that most of them are hilly and when the rain comes, they are easily prone to erosion. We have built covets at various times along some of the roads just to make them manageable but it is just a matter of time before the rain destroys them again”. He regretted that the town shares borders with some other towns in Nsukka, including Ibagwa and Okpuje, lamenting that going to those places was not usually easy for them. “Their nearness is such that you could go there from here within a space of 10 minutes but because the roads are very bad, you end up spending so much on transport,” he said. Similarly, another villager, Sunday Earnest, observed that there is no single tarred road that runs through any of the three communities in Edem and that such has caused a big bad luck for them. “For some time now, there has been this plan to build a health centre for us in one of the communities but till date that plan has never seen the light of the day because according to those that wanted to build the center, there is no accessible road leading to the proposed site”, he lamented, asking “we are very close to Nsukka town, so why are we being marginalized?” However, further checks by Oriental News revealed that not too long ago, two motorcyclists had died in an accident while plying the roads in the town. According to ChidubemAjibo, a youth leader, their deaths brought great sorrow and sadness to the whole people of Edem because “had it not been for the bad state of the road, their lives wouldn’t have been cut short so soon”. He recalled that it has been long government officials have been making promises to fix the roads to no avail. “The situation is very bad such that some mischievous politicians normally use the bad nature of the roads as a bait to secure their votes during elections whereas they end up abandoning us”, he regretted. Giving reasons the town needed government’s help as soon as possible, Mr Omeje, who is also a community leader, said: “The terrain of Edem is such that they need roads more than any other town. In some other surrounding towns like Okpuje, Ibagwa-ani, Alor-uno, one major road will just divide the town into two but in the case of Edem because of the topography of this place, it needs a major road network so that somebody can easily move from one community to the other”. Explaining what the town stands to gain if their roads are repaired, another community member, Mrs Eze Angela, said that accessible roads would provide them with the opportunity of transporting their numerous farm produce to the market. “If we have good roads, our farmers will be encouraged to produce larger quantity of farm produce. It will make movement to and fro other towns in Nsukka easier for us and besides, if not for no other reason, having accessible roads will help reduce the level of suffering we have passed through all these years”, she said.