Governor Dave Umahi has asked the federal government for financial assistance in order to deal with the landslide that happened at the retaining wall of the Ogwuma part of the road from Iyere flyover in the state's Afikpo South Local Government Area.
As soon as he had evaluated the size of the landslide that had blocked a portion of the road going to Ohafia in Abia State, Governor Umahi made the decision while speaking with newsmen.
Governor Umahi declared plans to clean the road within seven days so that government could decide the best course of action while attributing the cause of the landslide to activities of persons living over the retaining wall.
He made a suggestion that everyone living across the retaining wall would need to be relocated if the area was to be rebuilt to last a long period.
“This is Ogwuma, a section of the road after Iyere flyover.
“It has been totally blocked by landslide, and since 2004, we have been having very serious landslide here.
“In fact, I lost one of my workers here about 2008 during the construction of a very heavy retaining wall which is what sustained this road from 2008 till few days ago.
“As you can see, a lot of houses have sprung up there and so this had to disturb the ecosystem of this section of the hill and the effect is what you see.
“The road has been blocked and it is going to take quite a lot of efforts to even unblock the road, before thinking about how to reconstruct very long section of retaining wall.
“Nobody is passing through here just because of the activities of very few people.
“So, what my government is going to do first and foremost is to ask everybody on that hill to leave.
“We have to take over the hill for people to continue to use this road, especially at this time we have solved the problem of the Iyere Bridge which hitherto posed a serious hindrance on the road.
“We are going to look into how to clear the road.
“I am sure in the next seven days, we should be able to deploy about five caterpillars, dozers and trucks to first of all, clear the road for us to see whether the slide is such that it could be contained.
“Otherwise we would have to block it until we are able to reconstruct the retaining wall.
“But there is no amount of retaining wall that can sustain this place if people still have a lot of activities up there.
“So we are going to make sure that we evacuate everybody there so that we can reconstruct it.
“We can inconvenience few people to the advantage of a lot of people.
“That is what we are going to do.
“We will do what we can, and we will report to the Federal Government for help.
“It is up to me to report and I am sure that Mr. President when I report, will approve immediately.
“But it is up to the due process people to know that people are suffering and help because we have a lot of things in our hands.
“Most of our road projects are Federal Government projects, but who is the Federal Government?
“We are the Federal Government, so we had to tackle them but we don’t really have money to tackle this.
“So, I am going to report to the Federal Government.”