By Ijeoma Nwankpa, Abuja Nigeria.
The Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Amaechi says he is satisfied with the progress of work at the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos state.
The Minister was speaking to journalist after inspecting the level of work being done at the port.
He said a lot of work has been done at the port since the last time he visited.
”As a layman, I cannot say the percentage but I can say I am impressed compared to the last time we came here, there’s huge improvement and I’m being told by the management that by June we will be expecting the cranes and by September like we agreed they should commence commercial activities.”
According to the Minister, the Port needs extension and they are already discussing with the Lagos state government in that regard.
” I think we need to talk with Lagos management again, let’s see how to relocate them because actually the need for extension will be understated if we ignore it. Now that there are 5,000 persons we need to have the discussion with the community, we need to have a conversion with the Lagos state government and make provisions for their relocation.”
The Minister said the project was a privately funded project, which over time they would collect their revenue from the commercial activities before handing over the project to the federal government.
”But obviously taxes will be collected here even them will pay taxes, but I doubt if there is tax exemption, so we will collect taxes here, but we must say the confidence in giving them the project is because of the taxes that we collect here that will help in the construction of other projects.”
As a Minister of Transport I imagine a lot of things that I wished I could implement all of them. I imagined that the Lagos-Calabar bridge would start from here, that was my imagination.
But the Lagos-Calabar is $11.1 billion. But as Minister of Transport, I will start from Benin-Port Harcourt then to Calabar it’s only when we have finished that I will start to think of how to come from Benin-Lagos because there’s already a rail from Lagos to Kano. For me what makes it of essence is that, there are other sea ports around Warri, Calabar, Port Harcourt that need to be fed with rail too , just like we fed Tincan and Apapa.
Another advice I could give is, if they want to invest, they can invest in rail and then the government will either do tax reduction or do something to help them. If we get the 11.1bn as it is, we would probably have to divert the rail, because Lagos-Calabar actually goes into Lagos, we can divert it to come through to Epe and to Lekki here.
On the role of the Federal government on the project, Amaechi said that the federal government are playing the role of landlords.
”We own the land. We’ve given them to run and recover their money. So when they recover their money then we take back our investment.”
The Minister stressed that the Lekki project came out of the demand for port activities, which has exceeded the supply of Tincan and Apapa in Lagos
” We have more ports than the country needs right now. Because the malfunctioning is a big problem in Nigeria, couple with the fact that this is the first sea port in Nigeria, what we had all these while are river ports , the Tincan is a river port the Apapa is a river port and port Harcourt.”
Right here you have 16.5 meters drafts which is good for the country, but the country needs more than just one because of the manufacturing of vessels. We need just more than Lagos deep sea port and for me before I leave office I will emphasize on construction of the Bonny deep sea port.
So far, the Project has gotten to16 .5 on cremation while the dredging of 680 meters has reached 500 meters.
The project when completed would generate about $360 billion dollars to the country’ s GDP annually.
