Wike Gives Contractors Ultimatum To Deliver

WORRIED about the slow pace of progress in some of the Federal Government interventions in basic education projects, the Minister of State for Education, Chief Ezenwo Wike yesterday ordered the contractors to immediately mobilise to site or consider their projects as revoked.Specifically, he directed that if within the next two weeks, appreciable progress had not been recorded in some of the projects, the federal government would order some of the contracting firms to refund some of the mobilisation funds they have collected, in addition to blacklisting them from further government projects.The minister, while meeting with the contractors handling the Almajiri Intervention School under the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC)-funded projects in some parts of the country as well as the rehabilitation of the library projects in the Federal Government Unity Colleges across the country expressed displeasure that months after some of the projects were supposed to be handed over, a lot of the contractors were still battling with the rudiments of payments.Of major concern to the minister were the Almajiri School projects, which were expected to have been completed and handed over to the benefiting states since June this year, but were yet to be completed, due largely to some bureaucratic bottlenecks.From the statistics made available to the minister by the Consultants at the meeting, out of the 50 projects whose contracts were awarded under the first phase of the projects, 27 have so far been completed; 24 were yet to be competed, 13 of the projects have reached 70 ' 95 per cent completion; six are between 50-70 per cent completion, while five projects or 10 per cent are at below 50 per cent completion.
Click here to read full news..