By Philip Yatai
The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has assured residents of its ongoing efforts to maintain and repair traffic lights across the nation’s capital, in spite of persistent technical glitches and widespread vandalism.
Speaking during a news conference in Abuja on Thursday, the Mandate Secretary, FCTA Transportation Secretariat, Mr Chinedum Elechi, explained that keeping the city’s traffic control systems operational required round-the-clock intervention.
Comparing the erratic behaviour of traffic lights to mobile network fluctuations, Elechi noted that signal outages were often immediate and unpredictable.
“Traffic lights are like your mobile phone. You wake up in the morning, it doesn’t have a network, and then after a while, it comes on.
“You pass one now on your way to visit, by the time you’re coming back, it’s bad. So, we have a continuous and constant activity of repairing traffic lights,” he said.
He emphasised that traffic light maintenance under the current administration is not an ad-hoc exercise.
He said that the FCTA maintained dedicated response teams and active running contracts specifically designated to repair malfunctioning units and install new ones across the territory.
While technical issues, such as drained solar batteries, faulty sensors, and weather-dependent power drops contribute to intermittent failures, Elechi identified infrastructure theft and deliberate sabotage as the primary threats to sustained traffic management.
“Vandalism is also part of our problem. We fix something, they’ll go and take the batteries away. Sometimes they go and take away the solar components,” he revealed.
Elechi added that the issue extended beyond road infrastructure, highlighting severe sabotage affecting railway operations as well.
“Even in the Red Line, every day they are cutting high-capacity cables that we use to give signaling to our train. I’ve never seen anything like it.
In spite of these setbacks, the mandate secretary said that the transportation secretariat had the capacity and contractors in the field to manage the situation effectively.
Calling for public cooperation, Elechi urged Abuja residents to report faulty signals and suspicious activity around transport infrastructure.
He noted that while maintenance teams could not be everywhere at once, prompt reporting allowed rapid deployment to fix broken units. (NAN)
Edited by Funmilayo Adeyemi