Nigeria’s minister of transportation, Rotimi Amaechi said Monday during the monthly inspection of the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail project that it may no longer be achievable completing the extension of the project and also gets it ready by April this as earlier envisaged.
In the minister’s verified twitter handle @Rotimi Amaechi during the inspection visit and accompanied by Seyi Makinde, the executive governor of Oyo State, the minister twitted ‘’Looking at the state of work in Apapa, completing the project in April doesn’t seem feasible, especially the extension of the rail line to the seaport. We’ll however, continue to work and redouble our efforts to complete the project and meet set targets’’.
During the monthly inspection of work on project, the transportation minister, and Gbemisola Saraki, minister of state for transportation in company of the Oyo state governor on the Lagos-Ibadan rail line which covered whole nine yards, the first place visited by the team was the mega station in Ebute Metta to Apapa before proceeding to Ibadan. The large chunk of this rail line is in Oyo State.
Reacting to the minsiter’s comment on twitter, Kufre Abasi advised the transportation minister to sit down with the Chinese Civil Engineering & Construction Corporation (CCECC); the technical partners and fix issues.
Abasi expressed worry if Lagos-Ibadan rail project can be delivered in 2020. He lamented that up till the time of filing this report that stations are not completed, no points and crossings/turn-outs, no signalling done which will even take six months to test-run after installation including the signalling equipment installation that will be CTCS.
Last week, a 7-man federal government delegation led by Hussaini Adamu, director of procurement in the Federal Ministry of Transport (FMoT) accompanied by other top officials of the ministry and the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) returned back from China Wednesday this week at the end of a trip for the final acceptance test of 44 units of coaches and locomotives.
Following the Monday pronouncement by the minister of transportation on the delay that be experienced in delivering the project and the planned deployment of coaches and wagons on the corridor to ease passenger and cargo movement and reduce the perennial gridlock in Apapa, the implication is that planned deployment of the coaches and wagons earmarked for the axis may be delayed.
A breakdown of the 44 units being acquired by the federal government shows that 29 are standard and 15 executive respectively; with additional 16 diesels multiple units (DMUs) already shipped coaches and wagon
The $1.53 billion rail contract was awarded in 2012 to the CCECC for the construction of the Lagos–Ibadan segment (156 km) of the standard gauge railway by 2016. However, the project has also faced delays.
It is the first segment of the Lagos-Kano standard gauge rail project is an under construction standard gauge railway across Nigeria, from the Atlantic ocean port of Lagos to Kano, near the Niger border. It will run parallel to the British-built narrow gauge line, which has a lower design capacity and is in a deteriorated condition after many decades.
The standard gauge rail lines are being built in segments. Only the segment between Abuja and Kaduna has been completed so far, and services began officially in July 2016. The segment between Lagos and Ibadan is under construction.
