Warri Industrial Park is On-going- Uduaghan

LAST week, Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan was on a phone-in programme on DRTV Warri and spoke with a cross section of journalists and media practitioners.
Read on!

What is happening at the Warri Industrial Park Project?

It is just that our understanding of an industrial park was not properly explained. There are processes of getting an industrial park and some time before you started seeing something on ground; like in Lagos, for instance, it took about 10 years for them to even go to the site because it requires land issues, structural designs and all the studies that have to be done like EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments) and others. And for us where land is a big issue, we acquired the land and some people took us to court … and we had to pay compensation and up till now we are still having challenges of taking over the land properly because some of the companies that were there and really have nothing to do with industrial park are refusing to relocate and they have also refused to take the compensation that was given to them. What they said is that they want to be part of the industrial park. Industrial park is not just a place where every company can be part of. It is specifically for manufacturing companies. We also have challenges of even the acquisition of the land due to the nature of the site. Two, most of those things we are dealing with now, if you noticed like the advertisement in the papers, we have already advertised for contractors to bid for infrastructures because the first thing you will see on ground is infrastructure. I think the bid will be opened by next week and in another three to four weeks the contractors will be named and after then, they will start coming to site and start some form of construction of infrastructure which is the first thing that you will see visible on ground in an industrial park.
Is it possible that the project will be completed before the end of your tenure?
In fact, the project will not be completed in my life time. It is usually an on-going project.