TheCable

President Bola Tinubu is billed to flag off an agro-processing zone and inaugurate an airport in Minna, the capital city of Niger state, on Monday.

Umar Bago, governor of Niger, announced this on Friday when he hosted the national leadership of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the state.

Bago, who conducted the NUJ delegation on a tour, said the state would play a major role in the country’s agricultural sector with the agro-processing that is situated inside the airport.

“This is a free zone and in a free zone, you can’t see anything and we are very ambitious to expand the 2,000 hectares of land around the airport to 10,000 hectares of land,” the governor said.

“We are starting up from 2,000 and we will keep going.

“We are constructing about 140 kilometres of water irrigation to this place from Shiroro dam and these are our partners and the people that we are partners with from outside this country. You can see that they are ready for work.

“We are bringing in 80 megawatts of power to this airport. We are going to attract all of our investments to Niger state. There will be a power holiday for industries that want to set up here.

“We can give them free energy because we are housing four hydropower dams in Niger state and we subsidised 60 percent of the power consumed in Nigeria and we are asking for 13.5 percent derivation from the federal government.”

Speaking during the tour, Chris Isiguzo, national president of NUJ, said the governor is committed to transforming the state.

“If you go around the airport, you can see that it can compete with any other airport in Africa and that shows that the government has invested so much in this airport which is supposed to be a federal airport,” Isiguzo said.

“But the state through this hardworking governor has taken it upon itself to embark on this massive work.”