BY AMOS TAUNA, KADUNA – The All Progressives Congress (APC) administration in Kaduna State says over N152 billion has been expended on 1,053 capital projects embarked upon by the State government across the 23 local government areas in the last three years.
The State Commissioner of Planning and Budget Commission (PBC), Muhammad Abdullahi, also said capital projects investment worth about N113 billion have already been completed while others are still on-going in the state.
Appraising the achievements of Governor Nasir el-Rufai within the period under consideration, Abdullahi said among the completed projects, infrastructure got the lion share of N85 billion; education received about N20 billion; health – N6 billion with water and sanitation gulping about N5 billion.
He said the state has so far constructed and renovated about 700 schools and recruited 25,000 qualified teachers within the period.
According to him, “Under the Primary Healthcare under One Roof, the State Government has built or renovated over 100 Healthcare Centres, with 160 more expected before the end of 2018.
The Commissioner further stated that; “In addition to hundreds of kilometres of road being constructed across the state, each of the 23 LGAs has more than a billion Naira worth of infrastructure projects being delivered.”
Maintaining that by 2014, most industries in the State had closed shop; the quality of public infrastructure decayed; and the social fabric of society had fractured, with the city divided sharply into two, Abdullahi said; “A state of nine million people was now referred to as a ‘civil service state’, a sad allusion that only the 80,000 poorly-paid public sector employees were responsible for most economic activities.
“These same set of people had cornered a significant proportion of public spending, leaving eight million people as a dependent population, skirting around the edges of life.
“We were therefore all elated when, in 2015, the people of Kaduna State elected a new government led by Nasir el-Rufa’i.
“It has now been three years since that historic election, and while there is still much to do, there is a recognition that Kaduna is emerging with a solid foundation for progress.”
The Commissioner, who insisted that three years of huge investments have seen economic activities gradually returning to Kaduna city centre and other major towns in the State, said; “Coming in from Abuja, one can’t help but notice the large Olam Poultry and Feed Mill, a 350-million dollar investment, the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa located in Chikun Local Government Area.
“Olam’s neighbourhood has also just been announced as the home of the new Dangote Peugeot plant. Going through Kakuri, you will be confronted by the new 200 million dollars Mahindra Tractor Assembly Plant with a capacity of 3,000 tractors per year.
“Across the street from Mahindra is Blue Camel Energy, a renewable energy production plant and training academy.”
He also said that KADSTEP, a state-sponsored entrepreneurship programme run by Kaduna Business School, had graduated over 3,000 young businessmen and women hungry for opportunities, adding that the state government, in partnership with the World Bank, would soon launch, ‘Click-On-Kaduna’, a digital jobs platform aimed at creating Nigeria’s Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile. PBC’s project document showed Zaria council with the highest allocation of N52 billion for 99 various capital projects, followed by Kubau with N12 billion for about 45 capital projects, while Sanga got the least with about N759 million worth of projects.
