The station built by the residents of the community (PHOTO CREDIT: James Aparshe)
When construction of a building to be used as a police station began in Bakono, a rural community in Nasarawa Local Government Area of Nasarawa State, in 2020, residents felt, for the first time in years, that someone in Abuja had heard their cries.
For years, the people of Bakono and its neighbouring communities had lived under the suffocating grip of bandits and kidnappers, paying ransoms they could not afford, watching neighbours dragged into forests and returning, sometimes, in body bags. A police station, they believed, would change all that.
Five years on, that hope lies in rubble.
A PREMIUM TIMES investigation has found that the N43.5 million police station project nominated by a federal lawmaker, funded by the federal government, and awarded to an Abuja-based contractor, remains a roofless, windowless carcass: abandoned, without a signpost, and without a completion date in sight. The contractor blames inflation for the incompletion.
