Loomnie

Yahoo! news:

ABUJA (AFP) – Nigeria on Monday signed a deal worth almost a billion dollars with a state-owned Chinese engineering firm to resuscitate part of its dilapidated railway system, the transport minister said.

The 875-million-dollar (588-million-euro) contract was signed by Transport Minister Ibrahim Isa Bio and the managing director of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), Zhou Tianxiang, in Abuja.
The deal constitutes the first phase of the country’s railway modernisation plans.

As part of it, a railway track will be rebuilt between the administrative capital Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna — a distance of roughly 200 kilometres (125 miles) — over the next three years.

The Chinese government has granted Nigeria a concessionary loan of 500 million dollars for the project.
There are also plans to reconstruct a 1,315-kilometre track between Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub in the southwest and the northern city of Kano.

Once the pride of the nation, Nigeria’s railways have, like much of the rest of the country’s infrastructure, crumbled over the years.

Nigeria has a network of thousands of kilometres (miles) of narrow-gauge single track lines, covering nine of the country’s 36 states. Most of its locomotives broke down long ago.

The only passenger service still operating in the country takes two hours to link central Lagos with Ijoko, a small commuter town less than 30 kilometres (20 miles) away.

Mr Kunle Alake, the Dangote Group COO, tells BusinessDay that the textile industry in Nigeria cannot be viable, and he cites the usual suspect: smuggling.

“The Nigerian textile industry is dead; it has been dead since the last 5 years. It cannot be resuscitated with N70 billion, those pushing for the resuscitation are only after the sharing of this fund,” he said.

And now comes the reason:

“Smuggling has taken a new turn; it is one single act that is bringing the economy down. We had to scrap our Nigerian Textile Mills Plc (NTM) because we found out that the textile sector has no future”.
It would be recalled that the Dangote Group bought over the NTM and is currently using its premises for the production of sacks for its flour mills located in Lagos , Kano and Ilorin and as warehouse for its various products.

Read in full here.

Remember my last year post on the Nigerian textile industry?