The Project Manager of a Chinese civil
engineering and construction company, Etim Abak, on Monday told the
Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory that former President
Olusegun Obasanjo awarded the Abuja Rail Project in 2007 without an engineering design or a Memorandum of Understanding.
The Minister of FCT and current governor
of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, allegedly signed the
$841.645,898m contract based on an uncalculated estimate.
The committee was also told that the contract, which was for 60.67-kilometre rail project,
was inflated by $10m per km and that the length was later reduced to
45km without refund of the cost for the 15.67 km that was dropped off
from the project.
The Senate committee, led by Dino
Melaye, who were at the site of the project to carry out oversight
functions, therefore, demanded the refund of $195,878,296.74 being the
amount for the 15.67km that was cut out, from the Chinese firm handling
the project.
Abak told senators that the contract was
signed by the then FCT minister without design and MoU, and that it was
carried out based on conceptual design.
Abak said, “The contract was awarded
based on conceptual design and estimates were not properly done. There
was no formal design submitted and rail bridges and crossover bridges
were not captured in the contract.”
Melaye said his findings revealed that the rail project was inflated by over $10m per km and wondered why such an act was perpetrated by the handlers of the project.
The senator added that the contract sum
was $841.645,898m and that the project completion period was 48 months
while the scope of work was 60.67km standard gauge, with double railway
tracks and associated permanent way within the FCT.
He wondered why the 60.67km project was later reduced to 45. 245km without reduction in its cost.
He said, “Now, you have reduced the
length of the standard gauge from 60.67km to 45.245km, meanwhile, there
is no concomitant reduction if you juxtapose the length in kilometres
and the reduction in terms of the cost.
“If we are to spend $841m for 60.67km
and now you have reduced to 45.245km and the only reduction in terms of
monetary value is from $841.6m to $823m and with a reduction of just
about $17m, that to me is not commensurate to the reduction in terms of
length.
“The Federal Government has so far
invested N31.5bn and another N7.6bn from the SURE-P fund and if you put
these together, we have altogether N39.1bn invested in the rail project, leaving the balance of N113. 233,155.32.
“The N3bn proposed in the 2016 national budget for the FCT was for the rail project.
If you look at this, I would want to say that I did a personal research
and looked at rail construction of the same specifics, of the same
technology across the globe and one cannot but complain that the cost of
railway project in Nigeria is on a very high side.”
He wondered why it was costing the
Federal Government so much to construct a railway of just 45 km unlike
the construction of the same specifics across the globe.
He questioned the rationale behind the
government’s loan of $500m from Exim Bank of China for the project,
saying that the money which the Federal Government had so far injected
into the project was enough to execute the entire project.
He said, “From my own calculation, in
fact, from my comparison with other rail projects across the world, the
Federal Government investment in this project is enough to execute the project without taking a loan as high as $500m from China.
“From our research and it’s very simple,
the world is now a global village. As you are sitting here now, on your
phone you can google, even in India and Egypt.
“Fortunately, one of those projects in
Zambia was also done by this same company, CCE. We have six countries
and the average cost per km, none is above $4m per km. Why is the
Nigerian project costing $13.8m approximately $14m?”
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