By Jude Michael
The traditional ruler of Omor in Ayamelum Local Government Area of Anambra State, His Royal Highness, Igwe Oranu Chris Chidume, has called on government to provide access roads to the people living in rural areas.
The royal father who made the call during the weekend in an interactive session with journalists in his palace, noted that in order to address food crisis faced by the residents of the country, there was need for both Federal and State Governments to construct and maintain access roads for easy distribution of farm products from the hinterlands to the urban areas across the nation.
Ìgwè Oranu while reminding the Anambra State Government that Ayamelum was the food basket of Anambra State and by extension, Nigeria, insisted that the state should not base their road maintenance on which one was a federal or state roads. He said that the target should have been to provide access road to the people living in the rural areas.
According to His Royal Highness, ‘If we don’t have access roads to bring out what we harvest from our farms, there is no way the food crisis we are crying for will be eliminated and one of the easiest ways to curb food crisis is to give access roads to those people that produce food so that food can reach the needy.’
Ìgwè Oranu lamented the dilapidated nature of roads leading to Ayamelum Local Government Area, noting that the people of the area incurred huge costs on transportation due to inaccessibility.
‘When you are coming to Ayamelum, you have to come through Igbariam en route Nando; whereas from 33, you can come straight to Ayamelum. But you cannot do that now because the road is cut off,’ he said.
The monarch while acknowledging that the government could not finish every work in the state in a day, applauded Governor Chukwuma Soludo for what he described as the governor’s steadfastness in infrastructural development across the state and appealed to the state government to remember Ayamelum Local Government in the area of access road construction and maintenance.
