President Muhammadu Buhari is expected to commission the newly built Agricultural Machinery and Equipment Development Institute (AMEDI) Lafia when he visits Nasarawa state on the 4th of February 2023.
Buhari will be in Nasarawa to launch the campaign of the APC presidential flagbearer, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the state.
Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), Prof Mohammed Sani Haruna, disclosed this Wednesday at the Government House Lafia after meeting with Governor Abdullahi Sule as part of arrangements for the commissioning.
He said while in the state, President Buhari will commission the Institute, which targets 10 million jobs for unemployed Nigerian youths.
According to the NASENI boss, “the civil work is completed, what we are trying to round up now is the installation of machines and equipments, so the site is ready; even today you can commission it.
“Operation of the Institute is going to commence immediately after the commissioning, but we are not going to recruit fresh people for the site, we are posting people from different institutes of NASENI who are experienced to commence operation and standardise 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, so that they will be able to know how to operate machine and to teach farmers how to use the machines that will be produced 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 centers which are being developed across the nation at the same time, none is ready for commissioning like that of Lafia.
Prof Haruna disclosed further that the institute is President Muhammadu Buhari’s determination to make Nigeria a hub and supplier of agro-allied technologies, equipment and machinery towards developing the agric sector.
Governor Abdullahi Sule thanked Prof. Haruna for reforming NASENI, and expressed happiness that the institute will not just be commissioned but will be fully operational.
