FCTA Signs MoU for Abuja City Centre

THREE years after a previous effort failed to yield result, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Administration has signed a fresh agreement with a local firm, Chikason Group of Companies, for the development of $2. 75 billion Abuja City Centre project.
The administration and a Dallas, Texas, USA-based conglomerate, Balkan Development Center Ltd had, in 2011, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the building of a $2.6 billion Abuja Town Centre.
The epoch-making ceremony took place at Dallas between the FCT Administration’s delegation led by the Minister, Senator Bala Muhammed and the Balkan Development Centre Ltd management led by its Executive Chairman, Mr Gene Phillips, after which the Mayor of Dallas, Mr Dwayne Caraway, hosted the minister and his team to a dinner in the City of Dallas.
Under the arrangement, the project was to cover investment in real estate, shopping malls, offices, power generation, and infrastructure, among others, and was expected to significantly raise the tourism, entertainment and commercial profile of the territory.
At the signing event, the President of the Balkan Development Center, Mr Gene Philips, gave the estimated time frame for the completion of the project as six years and vowed that once the land was obtained, it would take the company six months to complete the engineering design and another three months for the take off of actual physical construction at the site after which the project will be executed in three phases.
However, the minister, during the fresh signing event for the same project but this time with the Chikason Group, hinted that the administration later found out that the former firm did not have the financial strength to execute the project. Attributing the cancellation of the contractual agreement with Balkan to the discovery, the minister stated that, “We learnt from our mistake in the past.”
Senator Mohammed observed that the general feeling was that Abuja did not have a heart and noted that the project, when completed, would provide the heart for the FCT with its iconic structures.
He disclosed that the new firm, which has foreign partners, redesigned the project to its taste but within FCTA’s template, maintaining that when completed in not more than 10 years, the project would create tourism centre for the territory with, not only its up to 20 floor buildings, but other facilities that can support night life.
The minister stated that the administration would take five percent equity in the project, even as he described it as one that would bring Abuja to limelight. According to him, the project was made possible by what he described as leadership brought about by President Goodluck Jonathan.
He said: “It has always been in the character of FCT to get local investors capable of delivering results. I hope the firm will keep to the timeline for this project.”
... to block N10bn revenue loss
The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has launched a new systems infrastructure initiative for its Abuja Geographic Information System (AGIS) to block loss of over N10 billion annual revenue in the territory.
The move was necessitated by the incessant reports of proliferation of illegal survey documents as well as violation of IT recording systems by fraudulent persons.
Giving the insight at the inauguration ceremony, FCT Minister, Bala Mohammed, disclosed that the fraudulent activities were equally perpetrated through double allocations, land racketeering and forgery but raised hopes that the new initiative would provide back-up data centre and state-of-the art 2013/2014 Models Geomedia Satellite Imagery equipment for AGIS and is to cover the entire FCT and some neighbouring states.
He also disclosed that the administration had signed Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with Microsoft Corporation, Gilat Satcom and others for a two-year maintenance of the installed equipment.
He further disclosed that with the flag-off of the Accelerated Area Council and Sectional Title Re-Issuance Scheme (AACTRIS) in 2012, over 6,000 applications were cleared, 518 mass housing applications processed and 1,118 applications cleared. According to him, over N520 million was realized as revenue within the last two years through the efforts.
Speaking earlier, the Executive Director of AGIS, Jamilah Tangaza, noted that AGIS decided to embark on the systems upgrade in order to safeguard the security of land titles.
She stated that the exercise targeted at providing an opportunity for the AGIS IT Unit to tighten the effective domain access and systems security policies.
Also, Senate President, Senator David Mark, who was represented at the occasion by Senator Ndoma Egba, commended the FCT administration for embarking on the innovative to drastically curtail, if not totally eliminate fraudulent activities of land racketeers.
He observed that the challenge of fraud in land administration in Abuja was a source of worry to both government and landlords in the territory.