FCT minister receives report on N61 billion Katampe abandoned project

THE Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello has expressed the commitment of his administration to public-private-partnership in meeting the infrastructure needs of the nation’s capital city.

Bello, spoke while receiving the report of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on the abandoned Katampe district infrastructure project.

He noted that the purpose for which the project was created about 40 years ago and the huge investments made into it would have gone down the drain if nothing was done to complete the project.

The minister set up the committee in March to review the N61 billion Katampe District engineering infrastructure project and make recommendations on the way forward.

He said: “Katampe has to be made to work, or else, the future of developing infrastructure in the city is going to be bleak. Again, if we allow the city to develop at this rate, with demography astronomically outstripping infrastructure, eventually, Abuja would be like many other African cities”, he added.

Bello said it had become necessary to revive the project to put the city’s infrastructural development at par with its demographic, economic and geographic expansion.

The minister, while appreciating the hard work and commitments the committee members put into the assignment, expressed confidence that the report would enable the FCT administration to leverage the lessons learnt from past mistakes in order to move forward on future PPP projects.

He said since inception, the FCT had basically depended solely on federal budgetary allocations to be what it is now.

He said the Katampe PPP arrangement was designed to augment whatever fund was coming from the Federal Government to speed up Abuja’s infrastructural development through private sector partnership initiatives.

The minister noted that Katampe was just in Phase 2 while the districts in Phase 2 were over 20.  He revealed that 20 similar “Katampes” are waiting to be developed, out of which nearly 80 per-cent might have already been allocated.

In his presentation, the Committee Chairman, Engineer Zanna Baba Gana, lamented the slipshod manner with which the procurement process was undertaken, especially the absence of due diligence in the arrival of the contractual terms.

He said this was responsible for the many issues that were encountered in the execution process, while revealing that the FCTA in-house supervising team was weak and lacked the full powers to actually take control of the project.

Engr. Gana, recalled that “the project was to be partially financed through the development levies the land allottees were charged to pay under a given time-frame of 36 months. It had been expected that the project was to be complete within the period, but as we are reporting to you now, I don’t think up to 30 percent has been achieved”.