Tinapa boss appeals for support from FG

John Ogbedu, Port Harcourt - 06.01.2008

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tinapa, Africa’s premier business and leisure resort, Surveyor Bassey Ndem, has appealed strongly to the Federal Government to approve the legal framework for the proper operation and sustenance of the project located in Calabar, the Cross River State capital.

Surveyor Ndem made the appeal at the Tinapa Business Resort on Saturday in an interview with our correspondent, who was at the project site for an on-the-spot assessment of the progress of work at the resort.

According to him, the draft guidelines for the project, drawn up by stakeholders and other regulatory bodies at the Federal and State levels to avoid possible friction among them in future, are still pending before the Federal Government, whose approval, he explained, is necessary to reassure investors of the truity and security of their investments in the project.

“Over 85 percent of the first phase of the project, out of three phases, has been completed and what we are doing now, apart from waiting for the approved operational guidelines from the Federal Government, is to test-run our facilities or equipment and make necessary adjustments, where necessary so that we take off fully, there will be no looking back”, Ndem added.

While expressing the hope that the first phase of the 265-hectare Tinapa project, which has already gulped N40b, would be completed in April this year, exactly one year after its official commissioning by ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, Surveyor Ndem debunked insinuations that Tinapa is a project for only the rich.

He pointed out that “although the greatest beneficiary of the Tinapa project is the Federal Government, which collects most of the taxes, including VAT, accruing from the activities of business resort, over 12,000 Nigerians, mainly in the lower income bracket, would be gainfully engaged in Tinapa by prospective investors”.

The Tinapa boss, who was the Cross Rivers State Commissioner for Lands in the erstwhile Donald Duke administration, initiator of the project, also called on the Federal Government to either convert the N20b bond it guaranteed on Tinapa to a grant to the state government or spread its repayment period from the present five years to between 25 and 30 years in order to give Cross River a breathing space”.