Gov Abdulrazaq commissions roads, distributes textbooks to commemorate 5th year in office

The governor of Kwara state, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, marked his 5th year in office as the executive governor of Kwara state with the commissioning of roads, distribution of textbooks, and more.

Today, he launched historic projects to commemorate the fifth anniversary of our administration. These projects are projected to have far-reaching socioeconomic impacts in Kwara state.

Governor Abdulrazaq started with the commissioning of the 4.7km Yebumot-Adeta Roundabout and Adeta-Oloje roads in Ilorin. He named the roads after two elder statesmen from the capital city — retired Major General Mohammed Abdullahi Adangba and prominent scholar Sheikh Yahya Murtadha Agodi.

He also inaugurated the newly developed Flower Garden, which is currently the largest green space in Kwara purposely made for outdoor recreational activities, promotion of work-life balance, and protection of mother nature.

The governor later joined at the banquet hall Ilorin by creme de la creme from the state and beyond to unveil the Ilorin City Master Plan, the second ever blueprint since the creation of Kwara in 1967, as well as the talk-of-the-town 20,000-hectare Ilorin Smart City project.

The idea is to make the capital city habitable, eco-friendly, and compliant with the rules that govern urban planning in the age of climate crisis, and bequeathing a legacy for those coming after us.

While the Ilorin City Master Plan has been designed to guide how the people of Kwara live sustainably for the next 40 years, the Smart City is an innovative response to the multidimensional challenges of urban living that now confront Ilorin, including congestion and the associated pressures it brings on the existing infrastructure.

The Smart City is a nine residential district city designed to host 540,000 residents and built in compliance with the United Nations prescriptions for urban living. The first phase of this ambitious project covers 11,000 hectares with an estimated N1.72tr funding requirements from public private investments between now (2024) and 2027.

Similarly, Governor Abdulrazaq launched a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) station in Ilorin, adjudged by the Presidential CNG Initiative (PCNGi) as the first in the North Central region. An initiative of the Federal Government, this is a direct benefit of the fuel subsidy removal of last year. He promised to convert at least 20 state government vehicles to CNG-powered engines in the test run.

As he was engaged with this cocktail of activities in Ilorin, his deputy His Excellency Mr. Kayode Alabi was in the northern senatorial district to commission the Jebba waterworks, a project that ended the community’s longstanding thirst for state-owned clean water source.

The governor later flagged off the distribution of 16,000 textbooks across basic schools in the state. He stated that his administration’s huge investment in education is evident. He took the state out of the UBEC blacklist, paid the backlog of counterpart funds from 2013 to 2019, and again from 2019 to 2023.

He has also fixed thousands of classrooms across the three senatorial districts, just as he implemented a tech-based programme, KwaraLEARN, that has significantly improved learning outcomes in our state.