ABUJA, SEPTEMBER 1, 2016 – The Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on wednesday approved contracts for the University of Ibadan (U.I.) and the University of Lagos (UNILAG).FEC approved the construction of a postgraduate hall, International House, for U.I., at a cost of N1.302,709,02.34, to be completed in 44 weeks.
The contract approved for UNILAG is for a new library, at the cost of N1.935,135,87.35 billion.
The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, who briefed State House correspondents at the end of the FEC meeting, said the UNILAG library, which was built in 1964, has not been expanded nor modernised.
“So this new library is to augment the old one. Completion period is 64 weeks. Both contracts are to be handled by a local contractor,” he added
The Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, said FEC also approved the renewal of a service provider for technology platform, e-wallet, for the delivery of seeds and fertilisers and capturing the database of farmers.
He said: “The e-wallet is a programme of the old administration under the president of ADB. The programme ran well in 2012 and 2013 but had few hitches as the ministry got involved in trying to select the providers.
“This led to debts of about N67 billion.
“Council today approved the extension by one year of the service provider. It should, by the end of the year, transfer all data to an in-house group to manage the system because the price is quite high, so we can monitor who gets what, at what price and keep an eye on cost,” Ogbeh said.
According to him, the company’s quoted N884,799 million, but negotiated downward to N380,512 million.
The minister said: “They will work with us for one more year, teach our people how to do it, domicile the data of farmers, 20 million of them, and continue to work on how to get agricultural input to farmers and keep away those who tend not to deliver but make claims.”
On his part, the Information Minister, Lai Mohammed disagreed with claims that FEC has become mainly a contract-awarding body.
Stressing that the council kept to its promise during the 2015 general election campaigns, he said only policy-oriented contracts were considered.
