Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola made this known when he briefed State House correspondents at the end of the Council meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday in Abuja.

He said the benefiting states include Benue, Bayelsa, Anambra, Imo and Nasarawa.

He added that all the affected projects were inherited from previous administrations.

“They are not new projects, they are projects that we inherited and we are trying to complete. So essentially they relate to cost revision because of the ages of the contracts and the prices of goods that have changed.

“The first one was the contract for a 13.5km spur of road from Onitsha-Owerri road through Okija-Ihembosi-For Ugbor to Ezinifite in Nnewi South Local Government Area of Anambra.

“That contract was awarded in 2011 but wasn’t funded until this administration came in so the contractor is asking us to revise the contract by a review of N488, 980, 891 and an additional completion period of six months and the council approved that review of price and the extended completion period,’’ he said

The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, made this known in Abuja, on Tuesday, while speaking to journalists covering the activities of the All Progressives Congress.

He said work is currently ongoing on only 13, 000 kilometres of the nation’s federal roads.

The Minister explained that if past administrations had shown a commitment to developing road networks like the President Muhammadu Buhari government, most of the roads would have been completed by now.

“We inherited a number of roads, and we resolved that we were going to complete as many of them as possible,” Fashola said.

“Many of these roads, some of them started in 2007, some in 2006 and others are even older, but unfortunately for reasons that we can only imagine, at a time that the country was earning more revenues, up to $100 per barrel, the total budget of this country was N4 tr.

“It is now that the country is earning very less, $40 per barrel that it is budgeting N13 tr. So, those roads should have been done before we came. Even the ones done by the state governments were not paid for, and so we are just paying.

“I think that a minimum of half a trillion every year over the next two, three years would be a strong support to really advance and complete as many as the 711 contracts we have. Again, some people are mistaking these contracts to mean roads.

“No. For example, on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, we have one road but two contracts. On Benin-Lokoja, we have one road but five contractors. So, the totality of these are 711 and the total road network now under construction or rehabilitation is a little over 13, 000km in different stages of repairs out of the total federal road network of 35, 000km.”