Oyo State Governor, Engineer Seyi Makinde on Tuesday said the immediate past administration of Senator Abiola Ajimobi in the state awarded the N7 billion Monica – Iseyin road contract to a “faceless contractor”
Speaking after his tour of the road leading to the Pacesetter Quarry and Asphalt plant, located at Km 25, Moniya-Iseyin Road, Ojedeji Village, Akinyele local government to assess the situation at the plant, Governor Makinde declared that the said contractor has no traceable office address
The governor pointed out that N2 billion of the total N7 billion contract sum was paid to the contractor and going by his assessment of the job done so far on the site , it would not be beyond that of N150 million.
”It was a faceless contractor and we don’t even know where their offices are located. I could have stopped by to go discuss with them but there is nowhere to stop by. My impression of the work done so far if I will have to evaluate and cost it, it couldn’t have been more than N150 million that I will spend on it,” he said.
The governor lamented that it was unfortunate that such an important road which serves as the economic route for farm and agricultural produce into the state could be abandoned after the contractor collected N2billion, with little or nothing to show for it on the project site.
“And you saw the road that we took to this place, the road is just not in a good state even if it for us to get this functional, we can patch this road to support the Ibadan-Moniya-Iseyin road because it is a major road linking Ibadan with our production centres of Oke Ogun as the food basket of the state and the country.
On the abandoned quarry and asphalt plant, the governor disclosed that the plant would have been fetching Oyo state government some revenue if adequately taken care of by the immediate past administration.
Engineer Makinde stressed that his inspection to the plant was aimed at reviving the facility in order to reduce the money spent on road projects by the state government,b saying. “what we will do is that we will look at what has gone on it through the files but it is a shame that we have an asset like this and it was just allowed to root because of political considerations. And we will have to send people here to check the integrity of what we have here and quickly see what we can do because we are buying a whole lot of asphalt from other places for road maintenance agencies.”.
”What we came to do is to check the integrity of the plant. Sometimes, it may be better to start something from the start if we cannot bring this back to life, but the concept was well thought of and the state government has been buying asphalt from the third party, so we might as well put this back to life,” he said.
