NASENI: Buhari to Inaugurate Lafia Agric Machinery Institute Feb

Igbawase Ukumba in Lafia

President Muhammadu Buhari is expected to inaugurate the newly built Agricultural Machinery and Equipment Development Institute (AMEDI) in Lafia when he visits Nasarawa State on February 4, 2023.

President Buhari will be in the state on February 4, 2023, to launch the campaign of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu, in the state.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), Prof Mohammed Sani Haruna, disclosed this yesterday at the Government House in Lafia after meeting with the state Governor, Abdullahi Sule, as part of the arrangement for the inauguration.

He said while in the state, Buhari will inaugurate the agricultural institute which targeted 10 million jobs for unemployed Nigerian youths.

According to the NASENI boss, “The civil work is completed. What we are trying to round off now is the installation of machines and other equipment. So the site is ready; it can even be even be inaugurated today.

“Operation of the institute is going to commence immediately after the inauguration, but we are not going to recruit fresh people for the site. We are posting people from different institute of NASENI, who are experienced to commence operation and standardised how work can go on in the site.

“It is purely an engineering science and technology institute. So, it is those people with bias in science, engineering and technology field that the institute will use and what the institute will train in future in order to know how to operate machines and to teach farmers how to use the machines that will be produce in the institute.”

The NASENI boss had told the governor that in 2021, the president approved 12 new institutes for NASENI and one of such institutes is the one in Lafia.

He said out of the six institutes and six centres which are being developed across the country at the same time, none is ready for inauguration like that of Lafia.

Prof Haruna disclosed further that the

institute is President Buhari’s determination to make Nigeria a hub and supplier of agro allied technologies, equipment and machinery towards developing the agriculture sector.

The intention, according to Haruna, “was to reduce importation and Nigerians continued reliance on foreign technologies for agricultural implements and also to conserve foreign exchange.

In his remark, Governor Sule thank Haruna for reforming NASENI, and expressed happiness that the institute would not just be inaugurated, but would be fully operational.