Home FEATURES Minister Laments Grounding Of Abuja Township Buses

Minister Laments Grounding Of Abuja Township Buses

Abuja busesThe FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello has lamented that the Abuja township transport service is almost collapsed, as many township buses are grounded.
The Minister who spoke in his office in Abuja while receiving a delegation from the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), led by the Korean Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Noh Kyu-duk, said that the running of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system has been quite challenging as substantial numbers of the huge fleet of buses in the system were down and non-functional.
“We are thinking that if we can get the company that is very experienced in managing urban mass transit system that uses buses, they may want to come in and we can go into partnership.
“We own the bus company but if we get serious investors, we can reduce the percentage of ownership because what we are interested is not to make money out of the business, but to improve the movement of the people within the city.”
Muhammad Bello noted that the geometric rise in Abuja’s population is posing serious challenges in the areas of managing the city’s traffic movements, waste disposal and electricity generation.
The Minister said that the Korean government could consider the possibility of investing in these areas to deepen its relationship with Nigeria.
He praised the Korean Agency for the proposed capacity building programme planned for the would-be teachers in its school, saying that it would create quality managers whose by-products would positively impact on the development of the country in the future by the time the school comes on stream in 2018.
The Minister said that the FCT Administration is working at creating a special unit in his office that would communicate directly with all the multilateral agencies and countries that are doing projects on joint venture with the FCT Administration to smoothen their operations.
He commended the 15 million USD Korea Model School being built along the Airport road, Abuja via multilateral cooperation between Nigeria and the Korean government.
He assured that visitors that his government is ready to partner with them on any project that any of the Korean companies is interested to do in Abuja, especially in the area of power generation, “because power is needed now more than ever in the city for all the public facilities; we get the power from the national grid and it’s not enough.”
Earlier, the Korean Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Noh Kyu-duk said that his home government would build certain parts of the Model School, while the FCT Administration will handle other parts.
Kyu-duk described the project as  unique as it would serve as landmark in educational sector between Nigeria and the Korean Republic.
The Ambassador recalled that the electricity situation in the FCT was much better some 20 years ago when KOICA first came to Abuja, but regretted that the agency is now running on generators to sustain its activities.
“Some of the Korean companies have good experience and technology to build this kind of power plant if the opportunity could be given to us.” [myad]

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