The federal government has rolled out plans to subsidise Compress Natural Gas (CNG) vehicle conversion kits to members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), Road Transport Employer Association of Nigeria (RTEAN) and Nigerian Association of Road Transport Owners (NARTO).
The Programme Director and Chief Executive Officer of Presidential Initiative on CNG, Micheal Oluwagbemi, disclosed this at Northern Stakeholders’ engagement on Tuesday in Kaduna
He said the federal government had procured over 20,000 conversion kits that would be deployed for the conversion .
“We are launching what we called the Conversion Incentive Programme with members of the NURTW, RTEAN, and NARTO being our immediate focus.
“This is because they are the operators in the road transport sector providing 90 per cent of the transportation in the country to members of the public,” he said.
Oluwagbemi said the conversion kits will be available to the transport unions at 50 per cent discount, adding that installation cost is free.
“We are already negotiating with our partners who will initiate that project in the next week.
“We have already identified eight conversion centres in four states, namely Kwara, Lagos FCT, and Rivers that will pilot the programme,” Oluwagbemi said.
According to him, the subsidized conversion programme is part of President Bola Tinubu’s strategy for having 1 million vehicles converted to CNG by 2027.
In his remarks at the occasion, Uba Sani, governor of Kaduna state, commended the federal government’s initiative for setting the pace in switching from petrol-powered vehicles to CNG powered vehicles, especially the bus category..
Sani, who was represented by Ibrahim Hamza, Commissioner for Works, noted that transportation is one of the major promoters of the socio-economic activities which deals with the movement of persons, goods and freight from one point to another, hence the volume of contaminated emissions released into the air affect lives and the environment.
He said, “Another major challenge we experienced is from the nature of vehicles we use which are mostly powered by Petroleum products that amount to thousands of fleets emitting poisonous gasses to our environment daily and also a high contributing factor toward pollution.
