President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday approved the deployment of electronic vehicles in the North-East region.

The Managing Director of the North-East Development Commission, Mohammed Alkali, made this known while briefing journalists shortly after a meeting with the President at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Mr Alkali said the commission would create a modular solar power unit across the region, which would be used to power the e-vehicles.

He also said the President granted the commission the approval to come up with the framework on how to deploy the e-vehicles in the region.

Mr Alkali said, “We are here today to brief Mr President on one critical activity he approved for us in the past two months. As you can recall, there was a directive by the President that parastatals should use compressed natural gas (CNG) or electric vehicles. We in the North-East Development Commission did a thorough analysis of our region because we cover six states, and we looked at the comparative advantages of both CNG and electronic vehicles. And after a thorough analysis, we came to the conclusion that for the North-East region, the CNG could work but electric vehicles would work better for many reasons.’’

He said the leadership of the commission presented to the President the kind of vehicles it would introduce in the North-East.

According to him, the vehicles are of three categories: the e-buses that can carry about 40 passengers at a given point in time, and a taxi for intrastate, which normally carries three people plus the driver.

He said, “And we also brought in a highly modified tricycle. Most of the tricycles we have in the North-East or elsewhere only carry three people plus the driver. But in our case we have modified it to carry eight people plus the driver, and it is fully covered and convenient. We also considered local content; the body was fabricated locally in the region.’’ 

(NAN)