A multi-million Ohanmi community road in Edo state has been washed away by rain two months after it was completed by the contractor, Messrs Hunslow International Limited, and supervised by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The road that is located at the Owan East Local Government Area of Edo State links many communities in the area. A development community residents say happen because it was poorly constructed.
It is not, however, clear how the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, saddled with the responsibilities of agricultural sustainability and food sufficiency got involved in the business of road construction.
Worse still, a visit to the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) website shows that Messrs Hunslow International Limited, a company that carried out the road execution, that was registered in 2009 has since been declared inactive by the commission.
Declaring a company inactive by the CAC, shows that it is a tax-evading company and ought not to have gotten a contract from government institutions for not paying tax.
However, how Messrs Hunslow International Limited, a tax invading company got a multi-million-naira contract in Nigeria calls for an investigation as that is a total violation of the country’s procurement Act.
Messrs Hunslow International Limited is not the only offender, across the Nigerian state, there are many, fake, non-existing, and inactive companies that have gotten contracts that worth millions of naira from the government and its institution.
The Nigerian experience has shown that many of such contracts have been abandoned while few of them that got executed were poorly done while the huge chunk of the contract sum is shared among the companies and their cronies, who often arrange for the contracts to be awarded to them.
MAWA Foundation could not immediately reach out to Messrs Hunslow International Limited for an official response as it has no functional telephone number and email contact.
