The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved the reconstruction of 21 roads covering a total distance of 1,804.6 kilometres across the six geo-political zones. These projects are to be undertaken by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) through the deployment of its own tax liabilities.
Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, announced the approval on Wednesday while briefing State House correspondents at the end of the FEC meeting held in Abuja. In July, FEC approved the award of a contract to Dangote Industries for the construction of five roads totalling 274.9 kilometres at the cost of N309.9 billion, advanced by the company as tax credit. “Earlier this year, there were five other roads – the Kaduna Western bypass, the Lekki Port road, the road from Shagamu through Papalanto, and a couple of others, and there is one road in Maiduguri. That was about N320 billion,” Fashola said.
“So today (Wednesday), we have another player. We have all the interested players who are still showing interest, but we haven’t concluded. We have another player who has shown interest and commitment to deploy taxes. It’s the government corporation known as NNPC.
“So, NNPC has identified 21 roads that it wants to deploy. Now, the instructive thing about this is that this initiative helps the government to achieve many things, including ministerial mandates three and four, which we discussed at the last retreat. ministerial mandates three and four, if you recall, was energy sufficiency, electric power and petroleum energy distribution across the country.
