The abandonment of road contracts in Imo State has been attributed to kick-backs given to various state government officials for facilitating the contracts.
It was gathered that the kick-backs ranged from N18million to N20million per contract.
Nigeria Newspoint also learnt that the bribe money was deducted at source for the receiving government officials.
One of the contractors (name withheld) disclosed that the road contracts were awarded to them by the State Ministry of Works at the sum of N120million per kilometre without documentations and designs.
According to him, government later reduced the contract sum to N90million which it further reduced to N70million before finally settling for N60million.
In spite of these reductions, he said different agents of government still required them to shell out between N18million and N20million as bribe.
He maintained that this arrangement made some of them to come to the conclusion that government was not ready to construct good roads for the state.
The contractor explained that this scenario is responsible for the bad state of some of the newly-constructed roads in the state.
He equally disclosed that some of them borrowed to do priming on the roads and are yet to be paid till date, adding some contractors opened up more than 200kilometres of roads before government said it was constructing only 15kilometres of roads per local government area.
‘Have you not seen that some of the roads constructed in the last two years have gone bad? Some contractors also cannot carry on thus they have abandoned the roads,’ he said.
Another contractor who did not want his name in print told Nigeria Newspoint that he abandoned his own contract because one of the former Transition Committee (TC) chairmen in Okigwe Zone collected N18million bribe from his contract sum.
He said he thereafter vowed not to return to site.
Meanwhile, the mother of the former TC boss is reported to have pledged to return the N18million kick-back to enable the contractor return to site to complete the road project.
