Tinubu to FERMA: stop fire-brigade road repairs, start fixing problems before they happen

by: Oluwaseun M. Lawal

The message from Aso Rock came in a calm, formal voice. But it carried a clear warning. No more wait-until-the-road-fails style of governance.

In Abuja on Tuesday, at the 2026 Roads Summit themed “Sustainable Road Infrastructure for National Growth”, President Bola Tinubu – represented by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume – told the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, FERMA, to change the way it works. Completely.

Not just patching craters after angry motorists start shouting. Not this “emergency repair” mindset that shows up only when highways have almost collapsed. Tinubu wants something different: preventive, planned, and backed by hard data.

He directed FERMA to build a proper, geo‑referenced national database of all failed and failing federal roads. Real numbers. Real locations. Real causes. Whether it is bad design, poor construction, axle overloading, blocked drainage, climate pressure, or just years of neglect, he said, the country must know why a road is dying, not just that it has died.

From there, he pushed for a full shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. Do the audits. Log the data. Study the patterns. Use evidence, not guesswork. According to him, a credible road asset database will make budgeting more accurate, help government decide which roads to fix first, keep contractors on their toes, and open room for deeper work with institutions like the Nigerian Building and Road Research Institute.

Tinubu reminded his audience that building shiny new roads is only half of the job. The harder half is keeping them alive. Sustainable maintenance, he said, is no longer optional – without it, today’s big projects just turn into tomorrow’s very expensive problems.