Lagos State Governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has charged the contractor handling the Imota Rice Mill project to ensure the mill begins production by first quarter of 2022.
Sanwo-Olu gave charge on Friday while on a visit to assess the project at Imota area of Ikorodu, two years after his first visit.
He said that barring any exigency, the 32-metric tons per hour rice mill being constructed by Lagos State Government would begin operations before end of first quarter of 2022.
Sanwo-Olu said the facility would be subjected to a pre-production test run before the end of the first quarter of 2022, after which the full production capacity would be activated.
”We are pretty much excited with how far we have gone with the construction and we are believing that all the contractors are working collaboratively to ensure that the deadlines are met,” he said.
Sanwo-Olu said he was elated by the progress achieved on the site, having met the project from the foundation level.
He said the project was expected to have been delivered by the end of 2020, before the disruption occasioned by the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The governor said the new deadline remained sacrosanct, prevailing on all contractors working at the site to speed up their activities before the first quarter of next year.
”What is left is to see how quickly we can ramp up work on the storage facility, which has the capacity to take production up to three to six months.
”There are 16 silos which have combined capacity of 40,000 metric tons. Each has 2,500 metric tons. The two sections of the silos are at about 85 and 70 per cent completion,” he said.
Sanwo-Olu said that construction work on the storage facilities would be completed in the next four weeks, after which major cleanup would begin across the major site in preparation for production test run.
He said that full production of the facility would drastically reduce prices of rice and pressure to purchase of the commodity.
The rice mill has been built with a capacity to produce 2.8 million bags of 50kg bags of rice yearly, while generating 1,500 direct jobs and 254,000 indirect jobs.
The state government is also developing an industrial park adjacent to the mill.
According to the governor, the industrial park will have amenities that will make businesses thrive and bring returns on investment to business owners.
