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Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja.
The House of Representatives has said that the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano Road contract was allegedly overpriced and awarded to Julius Berger Nigeria at the cost of N155 billion with a completion period or 36 weeks.
The House Committee on Works, which stated this during an oversight visit to the road, at the weekend, stated that at the time the contract was awarded to Julius Berger, there were other companies that quoted about N90 billion for the 375 kilometer road.
The chairman of the committee, Abubakar Kabir Abubakar, told journalists that though the construction company had collected about N70 billion from the Federal Government, an assessment of the work done so far revealed that not more than 20 per cent of the work had been done.
Abubakar, while reacting to the presentation by officials of the Federal Ministry of Works, stated: “The unit cost per kilometer for this project is about N450 million. We are not dumb. The cost is too high. Julius Berger says they signed for rehabilitation and now they are doing reconstruction. But even at that, the cost is far above the cost of a virgin road anywhere in the world.
“We have to protect the interest of Nigerians because this is our country. We don’t have any other country to call our own. We don’t want anybody to send a memo to the president later regarding funding for this project.
“What we are saying is that the cost for this project is too high. We know of some companies that quoted N90 billion for this project, but we don’t want to mention names. We have several petitions regarding this project in the House. The cost was initially N159 billion before it was scaled down to N155 billion.”
