Sen. Saidu Alkali, the minister of transportation, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Company (CCECC) Ltd.'s poor progress on the renovation of the Eastern Railway Corridor.
Inspecting the development of the work on the reconstruction of the corridor to Port-Harcourt, Rivers State, the minister expressed his sentiments on Friday.
Alkali expressed disappointment that just a 47% completion stage had been reached between Port-Harcourt and the Aba Section rather than a 47% completion stage for the full line from Port-Harcourt to Maiduguri.
“If you cannot complete Port-Harcourt to Aba, which is 63km in 12 months, how would you be able to complete over 2000km in 36 months?” He asked.
He expressed shock at the CCECC's employment of manual alignment procedures in the twenty-first century when laying the track.
He claims that out of a project's 85% Chinese funding and 15% Federal Government funding, only the Federal Government's 15% fund allocation has provided funding for the project up to this point.
The minister promised to return to the ministry to assess what may be done while maintaining the law.
Alkali, on the other hand, noted that connecting the two seaports in Port-Harcourt to Maiduguri and promoting regional trade at a far lower cost were two of the most notable advantages.
The minister gave the residents of the zone the assurance that when passenger rail service finally begin, it would do a lot to mitigate the impact of the removal of fuel subsidies on Nigerians who would use the train services.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the Federal Government started the $3 billion repair and restoration of the 1,443-kilometer Eastern Railway Line from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri on March 10, 2021.
Once finished, it will connect Rivers, Abia, Imo, Enugu, Nasarawa, Plateau, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe, Yobe, and Borno States.
