The Federal Executive Council on Wednesday awarded an N27,233,577,000 contract for the rehabilitation of the 30 kilometres Idoani-Otuo Road which links Ondo and Edo States.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said the contract for the road close to Kogi State was awarded to Mother Cat Ltd with a completion period of 36 months.
The Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Olamilekan Adegbite, said N1.85bn was approved to build a retaining wall as direct intervention for a salt project in Ebonyi State.
He said: “We import our salts from abroad, spending annually, something in the region of about $88m. Now by this project, it’ll mitigate that, it’ll not satisfy local demand, but at least meet some of the local demands and save us the forex.
“The salt is in Ebonyi State, of course, naturally, but it cannot be mined without this infrastructure we’re about to do. These are salt lakes that occur naturally, so the salt is in the lakes, but when water comes in, it washes the salt away.”
The Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said the council approved N580.5m for purchase of four armoured vehicles for the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency.
He said the 14-seater customised armoured security vehicles would take 16 weeks to deliver.
He said this became necessary because the gains of the anti-drug war had made NDLEA personnel susceptible to attacks from drug barons.
Malami said the armoured vehicles would boost the efforts to safeguard the lives of NDLEA personnel.
He said the government was “very happy” with the successes being recorded by the NDLEA whereby it arrested 18,940 suspects and secured 2,904 convictions between January and July 2022.
He explained that the seized drugs were burnt “because we’re not drug dealers, our obligation is to ensure that they are eliminated and stopped from circulating in the system. There should be evidence and the evidence is there, accordingly profiled before being destroyed.”
Olusola Bello
