Minister of Works, Senator Dave Umahi, has stated that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not recommend any contractor for the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project.
The minister said this on Saturday while explaining reasons the federal government awarded the project to Hitech Construction Company Ltd.
According to him, President Tinubu did not recommend any company for the highway project.
“ I want to say that there is no corruption in it. It is very transparent,” he stated.
Umahi, during an inspection tour of the highway project in Lagos, also reacted to claims by critics that the project did not go through a competitive bidding process.
He said, “Some people say that it didn’t go through a competitive bidding.
“I want to explain this: we have three types of procurement allowed by law,” he said.
Umahi listed the three types as restrictive procurement, selective/competitive bidding, and open bidding.
“When we started this project, we asked for companies that have up to five wirtgne concrete paver.
“You will agree with me that until we started this, the concrete paver was not common in Nigeria as it is today.
“We had to look for a company that had done this kind of project before, and that is Hitech.”
He noted that Hitech reconstructed the Oworonshoki Apapa Road.
“We saw that they got it right; so, we called them on Section 1.
“Then, we used restrictive bidding, which we sent to BPP (Bureau for Public Procurement) and we sent to the Federal Executive Council and they looked at it and corrected where they should and passed it accordingly.
“When other companies started bringing in some equipment, because they saw that Ministry of Works is insisting, especially where we have high water table, that we must use concrete, they started to bring in concrete equipment,” he said.
Umahi said that the Federal Government consequently opened Section 2 of the project to selective bidding and selected some companies and they bided.
He said that Hitech won the bidding.
The minister said that in Section 3A and 3B, the same thing happened.
“We have not gone outside the law, we have not gone outside the Procurement Act.”
NAN
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