- FG Okays $1m for Free Contraceptives
The Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, on Wednesday said the Federal Government has released $1m for the delivery of contraceptives for the enhancement of quality family planning among Nigerians.
Adewole said this while briefing State House Correspondents at the end of a meeting of the Federal Executive Council presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
According to him, procurement for the implementation of the plan had been secured.
He said following a presidential approval of the joint venture agreement between the Federal Government and May $ Baker for the production of local vaccines, a board had been constituted on January 19 to oversee the venture.
Consequently, he said Nigeria would begin to produce its vaccines within the next two years.
Adewole added that the government was fine-tuning arrangements for the enrolment of 320,000 members of the National Youths Service Corps for the National Health Insurance Scheme yearly.
The council also approved the completion of an abandon Gari irrigation projects in Kano and Jigawa states.
The project was abandoned at 50 per cent completion.
The Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, said the project was one of the 116 abandoned projects inherited in the ministry.
He recalled that the programme inaugurated in 2016 under the Water Resources Road Map of National Irrigation and Drainage programme from 2016 to 2030, adding that the initial focus was to increase irrigation by 100,000 hectares between 2016 and 2020.
He said if all projects were completed the government would record more than 100,000 hectares projected.
“We felt that we should complete this project otherwise all the investments made would have been lost forever,” he said.
The Minister of State for Power, Works and Housing, Mustapha Shehuri, said the council approved a N10.509,584,730.13bn contract for the repair of Hadejia-Nguru spanning Jigawa and Yobe states.
He explained that the contract was for the rehabilitation of the first phase of the road, which is about 30 kilometres. The job was awarded to a civil engineering company, Mothercat.
According to him, a journey which is supposed to be an hour drive on the road which was constructed in the 70s now takes four hours because the road has collapsed.
The Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, announced during the FEC press briefing that locusts and quella birds from neighbouring Niger Republic had invaded farms in parts of Borno and Adamawa states.
He revealed, however, that efforts of his ministry to curb the destruction by aerial spraying insecticides on affected farms and areas had been hampered by warnings from the Nigerian military about security concerns.
According to him, the military warned that Boko Haram terrorists operating in those areas could shoot down the airplanes spraying the chemicals over the farms.
He said most of the approvals his ministry got from 2016 to date had to do with pest control.
