Nigeria To Build New Port In Warri At $3.9 Bln, Seeks $45 Bln For Rail Projects

Nigeria has awarded a contract worth $3.9 billion to build a new seaport in Warri, Delta State in a bid to decongest Lagos habour, transport minister Rotimi Amaechi has said.

Amaechi also disclosed that the government has awarded a contract for the construction of rail connecting Abuja with Warri and Itakpe and to link the proposed new seaport in Warri.
According to the minister, about $45 billion dollars would be needed to complete rail development across the country.
He said that the country would have been covered with rail once Lagos-Kano, Port Harcourt-Maduguri, Lagos-Calabar and Abuja-Warri rail lines were constructed.
According to him, government has not spent more than $3 billion yet on all the ongoing projects.
“The Lagos-Ibadan rail will cost about $1.6 billion, that doesn’t include the extra cost of things we didn’t prepare for or see in the evaluation; Abuja-Kaduna was constructed with about a billion dollars.
“We also paid $500 million to buy locomotives and rolling stocks for Lagos-Ibadan rail. I can’t remember how much we spent buying rolling stocks for Kaduna-Abuja, that is what we have spent so far.
“So all the noise that you hear people saying we have spent 8 point something billion dollars is not true. I don’t think we have spent up to three billion dollars so far. Railway is capital intensive; a trillion naira is about $2.7 billion.
“And that is for 200km of railway, if you plan to do Lagos-Ibadan and you are looking at 8.7 billion dollars that is between 3 trillion and 4 trillion Naira. That is why I said we will need about 35 to 45 billion dollars.
“To be able to do Lagos-Kano, Port Harcourt-Maduguri, Lagos-Calabar and Abuja-Warri, once we do this four tracks, we have covered the country and we have solved the problems of transportation to a great extent.”