The Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, yesterday, said the Federal Government has concluded plans to award contract for the construction of the Lagos-Ibadan railway project. Amaechi made this disclosure at the 1-year memorial lecture in honour of former General Secretary of Alliance for Credible Election, ACE-Nigeria, late Comrade Emma Ezeazu, in Abuja.
The former Rivers State governor explained that, “The President’s agenda
is not just to recover loots. We are recovering as much as we can. But
the president is determined to create employment.
That is why you can see his focus. In transportation, from Kaduna to
Abuja, we have created over 700 workforce. What did I do? I said all the
villages or those communities along the route; I said they should give
them level six down."
Speaking further, Amaechi said, “Their job is to march on that railway from the beginning to the end to see there was no security breach. The rest of the applicants will go online to apply for the jobs. They said if we publish it, people will die the way it happened during immigration recruitment exercise and they will say Amaechi should resign. This year, we will start the Lagos-Ibadan, railway project. You know the difference between us and the rest, we will not say ‘go and start’, we will look for counterpart funding.”
On how the project will be funded, he said, “We will bring our
counterpart fund as poor as the country is now and give to the Chinese
because their money is already in their bank account. It is for us to
bring our own. If we bring our own, they bring their own to make sure
there is no delay, we will bring all our own to give them and say ‘go
and start work. If that happened in two years, the Lagos-Ibadan will be
ready. Tomorrow, I will sign the contracts for Calabar-Port Harcourt
railway project. Before the week runs out, I will sign Kano-Kaduna.
That is what we are doing. This is to show you we are moving away from the corruption economy to production economy.”
