The Federal Government on Monday released a list of 69 ongoing road and bridge projects in the South-East to debunk allegation of infrastructure neglect by some governors from the zone.
The 69 projects which included the rehabilitation of the existing Niger Bridge as well as the construction of the 2nd Niger Bridge, cost over N680 billion.
In a statement issued in Abuja, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed said the 69 roads and bridges spread across the five states in the South-east, were in different stages of completion.
The minister said though the contracts for many of the roads were awarded before the advent of the administration, they were either poorly funded or not funded at all, hence work on the roads had lingered.
He said the projects would have remained abandoned but for the funding sourced by the present administration from budgetary allocations, the Sukuk Bond and the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund
According to Mohammed, the government is also looking into the possibility of using a part of the recovered looted money to fund the development of infrastructure across the country.
The governors had alleged infrastructure neglect of the zone by the Federal Government, through the Director-General of South-East Governors Forum, Prof. Simon Otuanya.
Otuanya made the allegation when he presented a monitoring report on performance of the 2017 federal capital budget in the South East.
The minister, recently, at a function in Ilorin responded that the allegation was “incorrect, unfair and fly in the face of available evidence’’.
He promised to publish the full list of the roads and bridges, as well as give a breakdown of the total figure.
