President Muhammadu Buhari will on Tuesday commission the multi-million-naira headquarters building of the Nigeria Customs Service located at Maitama District, Abuja.
The chairman of organising committee and deputy comptroller-general of customs, Bashir Adewale-Adeniyi, stated this during the pre-commissioning media briefing in Abuja.
The chairman revealed that the 12-storey building with five-floor wings on both sides, is fully automated in line with modern customs services.
According to him, the project which was conceived in 2002 cost about N19.6 billion to put up.
He said: “We expect the commission to be done by no other person than the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria commander in Chief President Muhammadu Buhari GCFR.
“We will be starting the commissioning at about 8:45 am in the morning. We expected him at about that time and the commissioning. We run for a period of just one hour.
“We also expect that there will be some kind of restrictions because of the presence of Mr President, so what we have done is that there are three major places where our guests will be.
“There is an auditorium building that has the main auditorium and the gallery. We also have tents where we are going to have a spillover of guests who cannot be accommodated inside the auditorium.
“We expect ministers, heads of agencies and members of the diplomatic corps that we are working with. This is a project that was conceived several years ago, during the time of Alhaji Mustapha Ahmed Ali as controller General of customs.
“The land was allocated in 2002, works and construction started, sometime in 2007 while the initial model that we had undergone a number of redesign modifications until we arrived at what we have today will be commissioned tomorrow.”
