The scary statistics was released by the Rural Access and Mobility Project (RAMP), under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture.
It showed that about 15 per cent of more than 160,000 kilometers of secondary and tertiary roads are motorable.
The RAMP verdict came barely 72 hours after Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu urged the Federal Government to declare a national emergency on Nigerian roads.
He spoke during a courtesy visit on Works Minister Mike Olotememen at work.
The RAMP statistics also stated that the hinterlands, which has a large population of Nigerians have the greatest share of bad roads, 70 per cent of which are in the rural areas.
National Co-ordinator of RAMP Ubandoma Ularamu, an engineer, made the revelations yesterday in Osogbo, Osun State, at the opening of this year's retreat and review meeting.
His words: "Out of over 160,000 kilometer of secondary and tertiary roads in Nigeria, with an average registered network of 4,000 kilometers per state, only about 10 – 15 per cent is paved. While a large proportion of this network remains in poor or very poor condition with only 15 per cent of federal roads in good condition.
"It is sad to note that rural roads which are statutorily referred to as local government roads which constitutes about 132,000 kilometres (67.7 per cent) of the entire road networks in Nigeria is the worst hit by this state of disrepair."
The deplorable state of rural roads across the nation, the RAMP chief stated, have continued to impact negatively on the national economy.
As a result of these problems, he added that farmers continued to face the challenges of "high transport cost, long travel time, huge post harvest losses and high rate of auto-accidents".
Explaining the negative effect on agriculture, Ularamu recalled that studies carried out in 2006 revealed that about 20 per cent of total farm produce never reached the market.
The Federal Government decided to implement RAMP in Kaduna and Cross River states where they were designed to meet the needs of each state, one of which had 132 numbers of river crossings.
The coordinator noted that RAMP had proved to be a huge success in the two pilot states, which had elicited the interest from other states that have shown willingness to use RAMP strategies to address their rual road development problems.
The project, according to Ularamu, had adopted the Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) in selecting the states wishing to participate in RAMP to meet two criteria of governance and readiness.
Decrying the low-level of public expenditure on road construction and rehabilitation, he stressed that government alone could not shoulder the responsibilities of making roads pliable using the RAMP strategies.
Any state wishing to participate in RAMP, he added, must comply with governance and fiduciary issues including fiscal responsibility and transparency in the management of public funds.
Ularamu submitted that unless these issues were strongly addressed, the huge sums of money expended on roads could end up being wasted.
The Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola, who was represented by his deputy, Chief Otunba Grace Laoye-Tomori, pointed out the importance of rural road development to agenda of his administration which, he recalled, propelled him to write letters of commitment to the World Bank, Federal Ministry of Finance and the Federal Project Management Unit to express the state's readiness.
Explaining that his administration took cognisance of of the importance of efficient road network to rural development, Aregbesola submitted that the Osun Rural Enterprise and Agricultural Programme (O-REAP) has a mandate to upgrade 50 kilometres of roads leading to four farm settlements across the state.
According to the governor, the effort was already yielding dividends as many farmers had returned to the farm settlements. Besides, ten out of abandoned FADAMA III projects in Iwo Farm Settlement, Pataara have experienced a boom due to the improvement of the road linking the settlement with urban centres
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