Reveal cost of Lagos-Calabar highway project– Atiku dares Tinubu

Reveal cost of Lagos-Calabar highway project– Atiku dares Tinubu

 The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party
in the 2023 general election, Atiku Abubakar, has dared President Bola Tinubu
to disclose the full cost of the Lagos-Calabar highway project.

 

Atiku said in a statement on Tuesday that the Tinubu administration
could not continue to keep silent on how much public funds would be spent on
the project at a time when Nigeria was still facing dire economic challenges.

 

The Federal Government recently announced the start of
construction on the 700km Lagos-Calabar coastal highway.

 

The Minister of Works, David Umahi, revealed this in a
statement last week by his Special Adviser on Media, Orji Uchenna, in Abuja.

 

However, querying the contractor, the former vice president,
through his Media Adviser, Paul Ibe, questioned the Tinubu administration’s
decision to award the contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech without competitive
bidding.

 

He also wondered why the Tinubu administration released
N1.06tn for the pilot phase, or six per cent of the project, which begins at
Eko Atlantic and is expected to terminate at the Lekki Deep Sea Port.

 

The statement signed on Tuesday in Abuja by the Special
Assistant to the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar read in part, “The Tinubu
administration cannot continue to respond to the public inquiry with insults.
They must come clean on this project because Nigerians deserve to know the
truth. I, therefore, present six posers to the administration.

 

 “1. How much is the
total cost of the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway? 2. Why is the project being
funded by the Nigerian government despite being a PPP? 3. Why is the project
taking off from Chagoury’s Eko Atlantic? 4. Why is N1.06tn being spent on the
pilot phase, which is just 47km?

 

“5. Why did the N1.06tn not get the approval of the National
Assembly? 6. Why wasn’t there a competitive bidding for the project? 7.
Finally, how did the Tinubu administration get the design as well as the right
of way in just 7 months, since it claims the past administration of Goodluck
Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari never touched the project?”

 

Atiku further charged the Tinubu administration to, in the
spirit of the Freedom of Information Act, respond to the questions line by line
instead of taking the mundane and jejune route of “insulting their way out of
every inquiry.

 

The President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy,
Bayo Onanuga, had, in a statement, told Atiku to get his facts right about the
project.

 

“In his desperation to always want to hug the headlines as a
self-appointed opposition leader, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has
allowed himself to be led into a blind alley again by his poorly informed
aides,” the statement read.

 

Onanuga said Abubakar made “false allusions” about the
project in his “futile attempt to denigrate and find faults in the audacious
and transformational” road construction initiative.

Source: Reveal cost of Lagos-Calabar highway project– Atiku dares Tinubu

 - NigerianEye
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