Federal Government approves N3.9 billion for completion of five Federal Secretariats

The Federal Executive Council has approved the sum of N3.9 billion for completion of work on five federal secretariats in some parts of the country.

The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola disclosed this while briefing State House Correspondents at the end of Wednesday’s cabinet meeting chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari.

According to him, “What we have is a memo on the public housing side of our ministry. We applied to Council to revise the estimates and total cost of files of 16 contracts because the cost of materials had altered significantly since 2011 when these projects started and we want to complete them and these are the federal secretariat projects in Anambra, Bayelsa, Nasarawa, Osun and Zamfara states.

“The variation was for N3.975 billion total for all the five. They are handled by different contractors, but each one wanted a variation and the total sum of variation came to N3.975 billion and we sought Council’s approval and the approval was granted so the old contract price of N13,565,621,307 has now been increased to N17,541,456,168.”

Fashola said when completed, the secretariats would provide office accommodation for federal civil servants working in the affected States.

“These secretariats are necessary to enable us to house federal workers in these states. The problem arose from the creation of new states, in assets sharing some of the old states took the whole secretariats, so our staff in those states, across all federal ministries, are either in rented official premises for their work or squatting in state government premises.

“For example, my ministry has controllers in all the 36 states; Controllers for Works, Controllers for Housing. These are some of the people, apart from other ministries who have staff in those states.

“Council approved this variation and the intention is to enable us to complete the projects. You might recall I briefed you some time last year about the approval for the award for the furniture, so all the furniture has been completed, they are in the warehouse, so it’s just for us to complete the buildings now and install them,” he explained.