FCT minister restates faith in public-private partnership

By Mulikatu Mukaila 

The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Malam Muhammad Musa Bello has said that the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model of infrastructure development is a sure strategy for meeting the infrastructure needs of a fast growing city like Abuja. 

Malam Bello spoke while receiving the report of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Abandoned Katampe District Infrastructure Project. 

The FCT minister had set up the Committee in March this year to review the N61 billion Katampe district engineering infrastructure project and make recommendations on the way forward. 

“Katampe has to be made to work, or else, the future of developing infrastructure in the city will be bleak. Again, if we allow the city to develop at this rate, with demography astronomically outstripping infrastructure, eventually, Abuja would be like many other African cities. Consequently, all the reasons for which it was created 40 years ago as well as the huge investments made into it would have just gone down the drain,” he said.

 Malam Bello, who appreciated the hard work the committee put into the assignment, expressed confidence that the report will enable the FCT administration to leverage the lessons learnt from past mistakes in order to move forward on future PPP projects. 

 Malam Bello said since inception, the FCT had basically depended solely on federal budgetary allocations and that the Katampe PPP arrangement was designed to augment whatever fund is provided by the federal government to speed up Abuja’s infrastructural development.