BIODUN OTUNOLA: Without Stimulus, Public Transport Can Undermine COVID-19 Regulations via thisdaylive
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all sectors of Nigeria’s economy are struggling to stay afloat as some have begun downsizing their organizations.the Chief Executive Officer of the Planet Project Limited, an indigenous transport infrastructure development company, believes that the transportation sector has been worst-hit during the COVID-19 lockdown.
It is mind-boggling. Let us look at it this way. Nigeria has over 80 million people that use public transport on a daily basis. If you take the average national fare of N150 per day and multiply it with 80 million passengers, it will give us as much as N3 trillion for the period of five weeks. To be honest, that is a huge amount. So, public transport is one sector that the five-week lockdown really affected.
It is something our government should look into. If we do not provide a subsidy for transport operators, they will not fully comply with the COVID- 19 regulations. At the inception, they may comply but they will circumvent or boycott the system later. When they do that, the whole idea of social distancing is thrown out of the window. In other words, the government needs to sit down with the transport operators and provide incentives for them.
That is the quickest way to improve the public transport system. Right now, we need to enforce social distancing in our bus stops. If the infrastructure is not there, how do you ensure that? Lagos can do it now because it has a lot of bus terminals already built. Oshodi is there. Yaba is there. Race Course is there. But in other 35 states where such infrastructures are not available, how are they going to do it? They will have problems.
Let me cite another example. Granite is mostly produced around Abeokuta, Ibadan and Sagamu. If you are buying granite, it will amaze you that the cost of the granite is the same as the cost of transportation. It is as bad as that. That is a huge inefficiency. If we have a railway system that works efficiently, the cost of transportation should be about 10 to 15 percent. That is on one hand.
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