By Salisu Sani-Idris
The FCTA says it has provided N5 billion counterpart funding in the 2021 budget for the actualisation of Special Agro-industrial Processing Zone (SAPZ) in livestock production.
The Chairman, Project Implementation Committee, Prof. Muhammad Usman, said this at stakeholder engagements of Africa Development Bank (AfDB) and IFAD-SAPZ appraisal mission to FCT on Monday in Abuja.
Usman said that measures had been put in place for the immediate take off of the Special Agro-industrial Processing Zone (SAPZ) in livestock production in the FCT.
The chairman said that the FCT Administration had developed a strategic implementation plan for the next three years of the administration.
Usman said the project would help in the development of the FCT, noting that SAPZ was one of the strategies to deliver on President Muhammadu Buhari plan to create jobs for the youth.
He said the project would complement government efforts of taking 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in the next nine years.
Usman said that the SAPZ when fully established would improve modernise livestock production for food nutrition security and making available quality and price competitive beef and dairy products for local and export markets.
Usman stressed that the project would resettle pastoralists, decongest the FCT of roaming cattle and mitigate farmer and herder conflicts.
The SAPZ is essentially one of our strategies to deliver on President Buharis plan to create jobs for the youth and to take 100 million Nigerians out of poverty over the next nine years.
We plan to complement this with the production in the National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) of the Federal Government while incentivising as many multi-national corporations with interest in livestock and dairy production.
We have constituted a multi-sectoral, inter-agency and multi-disciplinary SAPZ project development team for FCTA.
The team will worked through the COVID-19 lockdown period, to prepare draft project implementation checklists, design layouts, and infrastructure provision cost estimates, he said.
Usman noted that the administration had aligned with the Federal Government policies and programmes on the ease of doing business.
He stressed that the administration had commenced stakeholders engagement to achieve top three sub-national ranking at the end of 2021.
In a presentation, Monde Nyambe, the Task Team Leader of AfDB, said the establishment of SAPZ was one of the plans by the bank to achieve five cardinal objectives.
She listed the five objectives to include power and light up Africa, feed Africa, industrialise Africa, integrate Africa and improve quality of life of Africans by using the small holder farmers.
Nyambe, used the occasion to restate the commitment of the bank toward actualisation of the project. (NAN)
Source: NAN News