Nigeria still servicing $460m loan despite failed Abuja CCTV camera project
The government of Nigeria spends huge sums of money servicing a $460 million loan for the Abuja CCTV camera project which never worked, the House of Representatives has discovered.
The discovery was made by the chairman of the committee on finance of the House, James Faleke, at a budget defence session in Abuja. Faleke noted: “Before this administration, we collected some loans and the one that strikes me the most is the 460 million dollars for CCTV installation in Abuja. I want to know the position of this loan, I am sure we are paying back but the CCTV is not working." Faleke further lamented that each time Nigeria takes a loan from China, it is the Chinese that would come and implement the project bringing their their equipment, personnel and the goods, "and yet we do not have value for the money, especially that of the CCTV. “Where are we? I need you to look into it and send us a memo on this particular aspect. Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, in her response, disclosed that Nigeria was still servicing the loan while she could not confirm the status of the CCTV project. She said her ministry would ask the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) authority concerning the status of the project. “The the conditions of the loans that we take from China always will be that a Chinese company will provide the infrastructure services. These are loans that are of 3%, the rail lines are being rolled out, the Abuja-Kaduna, Lagos-Ibadan rails are all loans from China and are being executed by Chinese companies,” she explained.