Abandoned buildings of Nigeria Postal Services, NIPOST, across the country are now to be converted to Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN’s microfinance outlets, the Post Master-General of the organization, Bisi Adegbuyi, has said.
Adegbuyi stated this at the on-going public hearing of the House of Representatives at the weekend.
It will be recalled that the House, via a motion at plenary, recently set up an ad hoc committee on “Abandoned Communications Projects Since 2000”. The committee is chaired by Chukwuma Umeorji from Enugu State.
Represented by Toyin Oyelola, his General Manager, the Post-Master General said: “NIPOST has just one abandoned a project worth N800 million and it is for the completion of NIPOST Corporate Headquarters and extent of project is 28per cent so far.
“NIPOST has currently 44 of 162 formally abandoned projects across the country but have now been chosen for the CBN Micro finance projects under the financial inclusion policy of the CBN and its micro finance company.
“It is a PPP arrangement which is converting all NIPOST supposedly abandoned projects to ongoing ones since they were all chosen to meet the expectations of the CBN’s financial inclusion policy.
“NIPOST abandoned buildings covers all the 774 local government areas of the country hence would be used as major driver for the project to meet the needs of Nigerians.”
Others who also gave testimonies at the investigative hearing were officials of the Nigerian Communications Satellite (NigComsat), the Galaxy Backbone, as well as the Nigeria Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, for various abandoned projects in their agencies, despite the yearly budgetary allocations for that.
