Naomi Gabriel —
The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Akinwumi Adesina, in Kano last weekend, on a condolence visit to Aliko Dangote, over the death of his brother, Sani, said the bank plans to spend $563 million next year on rural roads, transport infrastructure, water sanitation and agricultural productivity in Nigeria.
Mr Adesina, who also made a courtesy call on Kano Governor Abdullahi Ganduje, said the state will benefit to the tune of $110 million from the fund.
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Mr Ganduje’s media aide, Abba Anwar, disclosed this in a statement on Sunday.
He quoted Mr Adesina: “We are using $110m in Kano for our programme on Special Agricultural Industrial Processing Zone. We are in all, having about $563m that will be dedicated to that project in various states of Nigeria.
“With this $110m that will be used for Kano State, just imagine what we could do. Investing in rural roads, investing in transport infrastructure, investing in water and sanitation and we also invest in agricultural productivity to raise production of food.
“We are processing, adding value and lots of hundreds of thousands of jobs because of that,” Mr Adesina said.
“With this programme of hundreds of US dollars, we will help develop consolidated infrastructure in rural areas. That will allow private sector food and agribusiness companies to reduce the amount of losses they have, create a more competitive value chain, transform the rural areas from the zones of misery to the zone of economic prosperity and increase the amount of resources the state has,” he said.
In his response, Mr Ganduje thanked the AfDB President for the new development and assured him of the support and cooperation of his government for successful implementation of the projects.ⓘ
Mr Ganduje said: “This is what we mean by genuine development, when institutions are strengthened and individuals or collections of individuals are rightly directed.”
“We thank you for appreciating our modest development since we came into office in 2015. I was Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport for six years during military administration, so I am conversant with the Master Plan of Kano and I am conversant with the features of Mega-Cities, Smart Cities.
“So my dream is to promote Kano into a Mega-City. And a Mega-City is not only a collection of population. It is a collection of an environment where things are working, where traffic flows, where health services are excellent and aimed at reducing medical tourism abroad and where you can have security using technology,” Mr Ganduje said.
