By Omar Bah
A number of staff of the National Road Authority NRA have expressed disappointment over their management’s decision to assign them to clean gutters on major roads.
The aggrieved staff alleged that cleaning of gutters has always been outsource by the management.
“But for the first time, this current management has decided to assign its staff to clean the gutters when there is a machine bought purposely to do that. The assigning of staff to clean gutters has never happened at the NRA and I think the problem is that our current manager has no clue about how a modern road authority is run,” one of them said.
The unhappy staff urged the government to look into the current management of the NRA and address the abnormalities there. “If you observe since the commencement of the rains there has not been a single maintenance done on our roads. The Sukuta-Tipper Garage Road is in very critical condition but instead of assigning us to address that they decided to send us to the gutters which is not in our TOR,” the NRA workers complained.
Management reacts
Responding to the allegations, the senior operations and safety manager at NRA, Attorney Keita, agreed that in most cases drainage cleaning is outsourced. “It is only in emergency cases that we assign or use some of our roadworkers to do the drainage exercise but as far as, we are concerned this year we don’t have such emergencies,” he said.
He said all the cleansing done this year was outsourced “…and even where we assigned our staff it would be those employed as roadworkers, but no engineer will be assigned to clean drainages. I am sure those who spoke to you must have been roadworkers whose task is to deal with routine maintenance,” he said. He denied allegations that the office has a drainage cleansing machine that is not being used.
“We don’t have machines to clean gutters,” he said.
Road maintenance
Commenting on concerns about the poor conditions of certain roads such as the Sukuta-Bakoteh road, Keita said the routine maintenance exercise has not been effective because the equipment they used to parch the potholes are not compatible with water.
“We are only able to embark on the maintenance when we have long days of sunshine. We have already sent out adverts for the maintenance of the Sukuta road and very soon we will award the contract,” he said.
Reacting to allegations that the current NRA MD is not familiar with engineering work, Keita added that the current MD had worked with the NRA before and he feels he is perfect for the job.
