Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Danbazau, disclosed this while briefing State House correspondents on the outcome of the council meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the presidential villa, Abuja on Wednesday.
The Minister explained that the approval of firefighting equipment was to contain fire incidents, while the 116 Green Maria vehicles were to ease the transport of prisons inmates to the courts.
Speaking on the memoranda he presented to FEC for approval, Danbazau said: “The first memo has to do with procurement of fire trucks. I have informed this gathering before that when we came in, in 2015, I went round the Fire stations within Abuja here and what I found out was very awful because as at that time there was only one rickety fire truck on ground.
“So, we embarked, as part of the security sector reform efforts and also in order to reduce the loss and also curtail the incidence of fire, we embarked on the procurement of firefighting trucks, water tankers and so on. But the reform is not just about procurement of equipment we are also focusing our attention on the issue of training and welfare of staff within the various services.
“In 2016, we procured 21 firefighting vehicles plus other vehicles such as water tankers in 2017. The procurement was for 22 firefighting trucks and of course, 2018 is a repeat procurement of what we did in 2017 and also for this year to cost N3.952 billion for those fire trucks, water tankers and other related vehicles.
“The government is doing everything possible to ensure that the fire incidents are contained and also controlled. These fire trucks are being distributed accordingly. We identified areas that have the fire hazards and of course, we are just starting this and we will continue to do this effort.”
On the data centre, he explained that the whole idea is to bring together all the data used by Nigeria Immigration under one roof.
On the Green Maria, the Minister explained that the name was changed from Black Maria to reflect current realities, saying: “We just changed the name to reflect the current thinking on rehabilitation and treatment of inmates. We are procuring 116 vehicles.”
He added: “If there are no vehicles, it becomes a problem and justice delayed is justice denied. For speedy dispensation of justice, we need to do that and also to find means of dealing with prison overcrowding because quite a number of them are in prisons, since they don’t have opportunity to go to court due to lack of vehicles, they remain in prison but with this development, it is going to improve tremendously in ensuring that there is a speedy dispensation of justice.”
Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, announced FEC’s approval of N828 million as a variation for the Abuja runway making the total project N6.5 billion and another N1.2 billion for Pilot Cutters for Apapa and Tincan Ports in Lagos.
He said: “There are two memoranda that we presented from the Ministry of Transportation. One has to do with the Abuja runway variation of cost which had earlier come this year and was stepped down for the ministry to liaise in terms of pricing with the Ministry of Works, that was done and brought back to cabinet.
“So, the work reviewed and the cabinet approved the increase of six hundred and twenty-eight million, one hundred and twenty-three thousand five hundred ninety naira six kobo as a variation on the job which then will bring the entire contract to N6.5 billion.
“What we refer as variation is more or less additional work we ran into because of the construction and repair of the runway.
“The next thing is we have what we call as Pilot Cutters. These are vessels that convey pilots. Pilots are those who move the ships or vessels from point A to point B and currently, we have pilot cutters everywhere excluding Tincan and Apapa.
“Tincan and Apapa constitute the Western port. So, we came to the cabinet to request that they award the contract in the purchase of two pilot cutters to serve both Tincan and Apapa. It was awarded at one billion two hundred and ten million three hundred and thirty-five thousand two hundred and eighty-five naira thirty-seven kobo. That is the naira equivalent of three million nine hundred and fifty-six thousand extra dollars. The naira equivalent is N1.2 billion. It was approved and awarded to a firm.”
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