Minister blames ‘urban nature of Lagos’ for endless delivery of Lagos-Ibadan rail
The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi has fashioned out another strange reason for the inability of all his previous delivery dates for Lagos-Ibadan rail project to have been failing.
This time, he absolved the contractor which he had been blaming for the delay to link failures to what he described as ‘the urban nature of Lagos’.
According to him, “We have pipes. For instance, for the road to the seaport, we had to bring a company from Italy to identify the pipes and know those who owned them because the companies did not know their pipes.
“The next thing is, if we try to dig out the pipes, the power supply will stop in Lagos and there will be no fuel literally for the entire country apart from those from Port Harcourt.
“So, we brought another company that was not part of the contract. We brought another company that came to find the solution to how to build on those pipes without causing damage because one of the problems with those pipes is that once it is not properly done, the whole of Lagos will be gone.
“We have to put enough engineering to protect those pipe and oil that they carry so that we don’t have an explosion.”
Though the minister expressed optimism that the Ibadan-Kano rail project would be ready before President Muhammadu Buhari leaves office in 2023, journalists resolved not to query him on the reality, due repeated failures of the minister’s date of delivery for the Lagos-Ibadan rail project since 2019 to date.
