The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has described the roads as depreciable assets that must be maintained to preserve their value.
The minister made the clarification at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Federal Highway Maintenance Agency held recently in Abuja.
The ex-governor of Lagos revealed that road construction is a life-affecting asset that should not be gambled away, noting that from the day a road is opened to motorists, the lifespan and asset value of that highway begin to degenerate.
He said: “Experts will tell you that after the design and construction of roads, which employ less than 40 percent of the workforce, it is maintenance and operation that create jobs for a good number of people.
“So, from the day you start driving on the road, the heritage value of that road begins to drop and therefore you are already generating a need for maintenance and perhaps that is the way it should be and this leads us to the biggest issue of the need for maintenance in the construction industry”.
Speaking further, he revealed that maintenance and operation create a large number of lasting jobs for citizens, adding that the ministry is carrying out maintenance on 24 federal secretariat complexes across the country.
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