The Minister for Roads and Highways, Kwame Agbodza, has acknowledged that budgetary limitations make it impossible for the ministry to rehabilitate all roads currently in poor condition across the country.
He explained that no government ministry receives full funding for all its planned activities, and the roads sector is no exception.
“It is just a clear understanding that no ministry ever gets exactly what they need to address all the problems they have. Just because we don’t get everything we want, it doesn’t mean that you may programme to have activity on all the 94,000 (validated roads in 2025), but because the budgetary allocation is based on how much revenue we can generate, we may end up working on, let’s sa,y 20,000. It means that the rest wouldn’t see much,” he said.
Mr Agbodza was speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Wednesday, January 28, while discussing the state of roads nationwide.
Given these constraints, the minister said the government has, since 2025, adopted a deliberate policy to prioritise trunk roads over other categories.
“Since 2025, what we have done is to prioritise trunk roads. Why trunk roads? Trunk roads, because they are like where we need to connect regional capitals among themselves and then connect regional capitals back to the national capitals for obvious reasons,” he explained.
He added that once major trunk routes are rehabilitated, attention will then shift to feeder roads that link communities to these main highways.
“And once we connect those ones, then we connect the feeders, that is what we call the feeder roads. The feeders unto the trunk roads,” he said.
According to the minister, this strategy underpins the government’s flagship Big Push infrastructure programme.
“And so to address the trunk roads, that is what the president is calling his flagship Big Push,” he noted.
“So if you notice, the majority of the Big Push projects are the projects that are addressing the deplorable nature of the trunk roads,” Mr Agbodza added.
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