A Chinese firm, CCE, handling the Abuja Rail project yesterday told the Senate Committee on Federal Capital Territory (FCT) that former President Olusegun Obasanjo awarded the contract in 2007 with neither design nor Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
The contract was said to have been signed based on uncalculated estimate by the then Minister of FCT and present Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai.
This is coming just as the committee discovered that, while the 60.67 kilometres rails contract was inflated by $10 million per kilometres, the length was later reduced to 45 kilometres without refund of the cost for the 15.67 kilometres dropped.
Accordingly, the Senate committee on FCT chaired by Senator Dino Melaye has demanded that the sum of 195,878,296.74 dollars, being the amount for the 15.67 kilometres cut out from the Chinese firm be refunded.
CCE’s Project Manager, Etim Abak, who briefed members of the committee during their oversight assignment to the project site noted that the contract was signed by the then Minister of FCT without design and MOU.
According to him, the signing was carried out based on what he described as 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”.
The committee chairman, Senator Melaye said from his findings, the rail project was inflated by over $10 million dollars per kilometre, just as he wondered why the handlers of the project would commit such a corrupt act.
He the whole project was shrouded in fraud, adding that the contract sum was $841.645,898, with a project completion period of 48 months, while the scope of work was 60.67km standard gauge, with double railway tracks and associated permanent way within FCT.
Melaye marveled that the project, which length initially stood at 60.67 kilometres, was later reduced to 45. 245 kilometres without reduction in the cost of the project initially paid for.
He said, “Now, you have reduced the length of the kilometre standard gauge from 60.67 kilometres to 45.245 kilometres, meanwhile, there is no concomitant reduction if you juxtapose the length of kilometres and the reduction in terms of the cost.
“If we are to spend 841 million dollars for 60.67 kilometres and now you have reduced to 45.245 kilometres and the only reduction in terms of monetary value is from 841.6 million dollars to 823 million and with reduction of just about 17 million dollars, that to me is not commensurate to the reduction in terms of length, ” he added.
“The Federal Government has so far invested 31.5 billion dollars and another 7.6 billion from the SURE-P fund and if you put these together, we have altogether 39.1 billion dollars invested in the rail project, leaving the balance of 113. 233,155.32 dollars. The sum of three billion dollars proposed in the 2016 national budget of the FCT 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 this railway project in Nigeria is on a very high side.”
The committee chairman wondered why it cost the federal government so much money to construct a railway of just 45 kilometres, unlike the construction of the same specifics across the globe.
He questioned the rational behind the government’s loan of $500 million from Exim Bank of China for the project, saying the money the federal government had so far injected into the project was far enough to execute the entire project.
His words: “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 500 million dollars 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 kilometre, non is above four million dollars per kilometre. Why is the Nigerian project is costing 13.8 approximately 14 million dollars per kilometre”.
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