Buhari to enter into high speed railway agreement with chinese Xi Jingping

CHINA may be commissioned to build a high speed rail link across Nigeria over the coming week as President Muhammadu Buhari plans to finalise agreements with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at an economic summit in South Africa next week.

Today, President Buhari leaves for the Forum on China/Africa Cooperation (Focac) taking place in Johannesburg where he will discuss a coastal railway project stretching for 1,402km linking Lagos with Calabar. It is expected to be financed with a $12bn Chinese loan and which will create about 200,000 jobs. 

Last month, President Buhari discussed the matter with Premier Jinping on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly Summit in New York. At the meeting, President Buhari indicated that he wanted China to resume stalled rail projects under new terms that would see the Asian country providing nearly all the financing required.

Another rail project that will be up for renegotiation is the $8.3bn Lagos-Kano standard gauge modernisation project, of which only a segment, the Kaduna-Abuja route, has reached completion stage. President Buhari is also expected to discuss ways of removing all obstacles in the way of the 3,050 megawatts Mambilla Power Station, considered a strategic project which was conceived in 1982 but yet to taken off. 

Premier Jinping had informed President Buhari of his country’s willingness to finance the whole project through a special loan agreement. In President Buhari’s entourage to help negotiate the deal will be foreign minister Geoffrey Onyema, transport minister Rotimi Amaechi and the minister of industry, trade and investment Okechukwu Enelamah.

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