Fashola’s BRT May Fold Up
This may be a blow to the mega city project of the Lagos State governor. During the previous election, the governor promised all that he would work hard into turning the state into a mega city. The first phase in transportation he claimed was the importation of buses to run the state-owned Bus Rapid Transit popularly known as BRT. At the inception many would abandon their cars at home to join the then popular air conditioned LAGBUS, then came a time some of the other ones started developing faults.
And that marked the beginning of the end of the noble idea to force the elites to drop their cars at home; it was seen as a brave move when the Lagos Metropolitan Transport Agency (LAMATA), the parastatal of the state government that is responsible for the management of the Lagos-owned buses of the BRT scheme, decided to give right to private operators to run the BRT buses, some of which are the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), Mutual Benefit, Igatuntun Cooperatives and many more who run the blue buses while the LAGBUS runs the red buses.
Recently it was discovered that most of the air-conditioned buses which are mostly run by the state-owned Lagbus started disappearing to be replaced by the non-A/C ones and these forced the very selective elites into the society to return to their personal cars and this in turn resulted in traffic gridlock that the State has been facing since last year. Sources within the system revealed to Global News that the disappearance is long overdue as the buses approved by the state government is not of good quality and their parts are difficult to find here.
It was reliably gathered that when it was obvious that the parts may become a problem, the government bought excess of the bus while some new ones are turned to parts as the maintenance section of LAGBUS Company will loosen any part it wants from the ones that were packed for that purpose and this was the way the company had been able to maintain the buses all this while. The problem now is that the parts on ground have been exhausted, which informs the reason the BRT buses are gradually turning back to the dreaded commercial automobile popularly known as “molue”. There are situations where four to six seats are missing in some of these buses and on other occasions, the doors are missing.
Findings revealed that apart from the fact that the buses are cheap, somebody in the government was also involved in the procurement and from all indications, the BRT scheme may be heading for the rock as the only reason it is still being patronized is the fact that it is cheap compared to other commercial buses in town. It may be the first setback towards the actualization of Governor Fashola’s Mega City project and that has also been raising doubts about the durability of his planned rail project.
