Train Attacks: Buhari Approves Railway Surveillance Contract

Train Attacks: Buhari Approves Railway Surveillance Contract

To avert a repeat of the recent bandits’ attack on a Kaduna-Abuja bound train that claimed eight lives with scores injured of which many passengers are still in captivity, President Muhammadu Buhari has approved a railway surveillance contract.

A presidency source, who disclosed the development to Vanguard, lamented the manner the contract was shot down by the Federal Executive Council, FEC on September 24, 2021, despite approval by the Bureau for Public Procurement, BPP, saying that if the contract had been approved earlier, the recent disaster would have been avoided.

Said the source: “At the September 24, 2021 FEC meeting the Minister of Transportation, Mr. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi presented a memo for the procurement and installation of electronic surveillance equipment system and intervention unit on the Abuja to Kaduna rail line. The memo proposed a monitoring and surveillance system that would detect any intrusion on the rail and an emergency response system. However, the memo was discredited and stepped down.

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Even when Amaechi pleaded that he will go back and get all the technical details and present them at the next FEC meeting, the plea was rejected and the memo was killed on the spot. “And this I must say again is very very unusual. I can’t even count the number of memos from other members of cabinet that had gone through FEC approval without all the technical details at the onset. These details are usually worked out with BPP. And in this Amaechi’s case, there was already a BPP approval, with a certificate of no objection for the contract.”

The source dismissed the issues raised about the contractor, Messrs Mogjan Nigeria Limited/Cagewon Dot Net Limited. “The number of years the company has been in existence does not take away its competence and ability to execute the contract successfully. “

Were they found to be unable to execute the job? The answer is obviously no. So condemning the firm just because it’s relatively young is like giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it. What we should be looking at is their competence and ability to do the job, which was not in question. Whatever may have been the deficiencies in that memo for the rail surveillance was not strong enough to kill the memo at FEC. Perhaps, if we had the security surveillance in place, the bandits’ attack would have been averted. This is why we should not play politics with everything, especially with lives. However, I am glad that the President has approved the contract to secure the rail line,” the source disclosed.