ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s upper house of parliament will investigate a railway concession the government wants to grant to U.S. firm General Electric over possible violations by Nigerian officials, lawmakers said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The lower house had already launched a similar inquiry last month into talks between the government and GE on a railway concession deal worth around $2 billion.<\/p>\n
Nigeria has been looking for partners to overhaul its ageing railway system, which was built mainly by British colonial rulers before independence in 1960.<\/p>\n
The Senate wants to investigate whether the government had violated rules by opening talks with the U.S. firm without consulting parliament or other state bodies, lawmakers said.<\/p>\n
“The Ministry of Transport has violated the provisions of the Public Enterprises Act, 1999 by unilaterally engaging the General Electric for the concessioning the of the Western (Lagos-Kano) and Eastern (Port Harcourt-Maiduguri) rail lines,” a motion approved by Senators said.<\/p>\n
It refers to two north-south rail lines the government wants GE to rebuild. The lawmakers did not make any allegations of wrongdoing against the firm.<\/p>\n
The government said last month more talks were needed with GE on the possible concession.<\/p>\n
Nigeria, suffering from a slump in crude exports, wants to boost exports of non-oil products but lacks roads or functioning railways.<\/p>\n
It has already signed two deals worth around $5 billion with China Civil Engineering Construction Corp (CCECC), part of China’s state-owned railway construction firm, to modernize several railway lines, the Nigerian Transport Ministry has said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s upper house of parliament will investigate a railway concession the government wants to grant to U.S. firm General Electric over possible violations by Nigerian officials, lawmakers said on Tuesday. The lower house had already launched a similar inquiry last month into talks between the government and GE on a railway concession Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}