Governments Advised To Harness Mambila
Potentials
The
Nigerian government and states in the country have been urged
collaborate to harness the electricity potentials of the
Mambilla Plateau.
The Taraba state Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Labo Usman, said
in Jalingo that harnessing the electricity potential of the
state would assist in addressing the country's electricity
challenges.
The Mambila power project
Usman asked stakeholders in the power sector to see the Mambilla
Hydro-Electric Power Project, initiated by the Nigerian
government in 2005, as a national project that would serve the
entire country.
The commissioner said the project, which was envisaged to
generate two thousand six hundred megawatts of electricity could
generate about
six thousand megawatts if its potential was fully harnessed.
He was speaking at a forum to host the Peer Review Team of
Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) which inspected projects in the
state.
Abandoned Project
The contract for the feasibility study of the project was
awarded to two Chinese firms by the past government in April
2005.
The project was supposed to have been completed within fifteen
months from the time of the signing of the contract but the site
has remained abandoned after the ground-breaking in April 2007.
The total contract sum was about N600 million then, but
the firm allegedly abandoned the job after its officials
collected N370 million from the Ministry of Energy to
cover the auto-mapping of the Mambilla.
A spokesman for the peer review team, Mr. Asishana Okauru,
explained that the thirty-six state governors had in 2009,
decided to review projects undertaken in states across Nigeria,
with a view to encouraging a healthy competition.
Okauru said the essence of the projects’ appraisal was to
identify best practices in areas of agriculture, health,
education, water and other developmental issues that could be
benchmarked.
NAN/Williams/Yinka
