Poor project funding, major challenge of my tenure – Adamu

The minister of Water Resources, Engr. Suleiman Adamu has revealed that poor project funding was a major challenge during his time in the ministry, resulting in many of the projects suffering time and cost overrun.

He however, said though he inherited 116 either abandoned or comatose projects, 11 of these projects have been completed and commissioned while five others are completed but yet to be commissioned.

Adamu said this on Monday during his valedictory press conference in Abuja on Monday

He said the abandoned projects includes 38 Irrigation & Drainage; 37 Dams & Reservoir; 41 Water Supply.

According to him, “Early in 2016, we undertook a Technical Audit and categorized all the 116 uncompleted and abandoned projects into high, medium and low priorities. Available Resources were committed towards actualizing the completion and commissioning all the high and medium priority projects. Projects that were ascertained as non-viable by the Technical Audit were dropped completely. So far, 11 projects have been completed and commissioned.

“Many more ongoing water supply, Dam and Irrigation projects are scheduled to be completed between now and 2023,” he explained.

Adamu said when I assumed office in 2015, institutional lapses and inadequacies were also evident in the Ministry as at 2015, especially in the deployment of human resources, technical capacity, planning, design and contract administration of Projects, and in areas of data generation and management.

He said important departments such as Planning, Research & Statistics and River Basin Development Operations & Inspectorate were headed by non-technical personnel and could not therefore adequately deal with the challenges at hand.

On hydropower projects, Adamu said the National Water Resources Masterplan has identified that Nigeria has a Hydro Power potential of 12,220 MW and that it is therefore important to pursue more vigorously hydro power generation to meet the nation’s needs.

According to him, “The concessioning of 30MW Gurara Hydropower plant has attained financial closure and it is planned to come into full operation soon. The process for concession of the 40MW Kashimbilla Hydropower plant, recently completed, has also commenced.

“In addition, we are in discussion with potential investors for other hydropower projects including Gurara II (360MW), Lokoja (750MW) and Makurdi (1000MW), among others,” he said

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