Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi, has blamed the delay in the completion of the Lagos-Ibadan rail project on the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
During a live TV programme on AIT, the minister said the ongoing construction work on the Lagos-Ibadan rail project has been put on hold because of the COVID-19 spread to Nigeria.
According to Amaechi, the employees of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), the contractor handling the project, were still in China on the orders of the Chinese government.
“If not for coronavirus we would have finished the Lagos-Ibadan rail, although the project is nearly completed. The CCECC workers are still in China,” he said.
Nigeria recorded her first case of the viruswhen an Italian businessman landed in Lagos, the country’s most populous city, late February.
Since the disease was diagnosed in Nigeria, over 100 people have been quarantined in Lagos and Ogun states.
The coronavirus has killed over 3,200 people across the world, mostly in China where it was first detected in 2019.
There have been over 95,000 reported cases, with infections on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
