Former Power and Steel Minister Olu Agunloye has levelled severe claims against former President Olusegun Obasanjo, alleging a distortion of facts over the multibillion-dollar Mambilla Hydropower Project. Agunloye’s comments shed new light on the project’s past, exposing a web of disagreements, alterations in contractual agreements, and alleged corruption.<\/p>\n
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For decades, the Mambilla Hydropower Project, a massive project aiming at producing Nigeria’s largest power plant with a capacity of 3,050 megawatts, has been entangled in controversy and legal problems. The latest remarks made by Agunloye are intended to correct the record on this complicated subject.<\/p>\n
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According to Agunloye, the Obasanjo government awarded the project to Sunrise Power and Transmission Ltd in 2003. The Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) arrangement had the audacious objective of giving Nigeria a sizable supply of power at no expense to the Nigerian government.<\/p>\n
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However, Agunloye alleges that after his departure from government as a minister in 2003, Obasanjo had a change of heart regarding the project’s terms. Obasanjo decided that the Nigerian government should directly fund the project, deviating from the original BOT agreement.<\/p>\n
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The former minister asserts that President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua terminated the project in 2008 due to alleged corruption involving officials who served under Obasanjo between 2003 and 2007.<\/p>\n
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Agunloye further disputes Obasanjo’s characterization of the project as a $6 billion contract. He insists that the contract was a Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) arrangement, in which the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) was not required to make any payments to the contractor, Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited (Sunrise).<\/p>\n
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He claims that Sunrise has not received any payments from the FGN since 2000. Instead, Sunrise was supposed to secure its own funds to finance and execute the project independently.<\/p>\n
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Agunloye concludes by stating that the investment made by Sunrise in constructing the Mambilla hydroelectric project, up to the completion stage of delivering electricity, was valued at a maximum of $6 billion by four Ministers of Power and Obasanjo himself prior to Agunloye’s appointment as Minister of Power.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former Power and Steel Minister Olu Agunloye has levelled severe claims against former President Olusegun Obasanjo, alleging a distortion of facts over the multibillion-dollar Mambilla Hydropower Project. Agunloye’s comments shed new light on the project’s past, exposing a web of disagreements, alterations in contractual agreements, and alleged corruption. For decades, the Mambilla Hydropower Project, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-2157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2159,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157\/revisions\/2159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}