NIGERIA SPENDS £1 BILLION POUNDS ON SPACE PROJECT

Nigeria is spending millions to put a man into space – as Britain hands it more than £1billion in foreign aid.The £1.14billion Nigeria will receive over the five years of the Coalition is double the £500million set aside to prop up struggling accident and emergency departments at our own hospitals. 

Backbench Tory MP Philip Davies said it was ‘totally unjustifiable and unaffordable’ for Britain to give this money to Nigeria, given the scale of its ‘grandiose’ space programme.

‘We cannot go around the world saying “don’t worry, we will feed your public for you while you waste your money on all sorts of other projects”,’ he said. 

‘We have got to say to these countries “you have got to spend that money on your people where it’s most needed not on some grandiose space programme”. We are against welfare dependency at home but at the same time we are encouraging welfare dependency abroad.’

The row surrounding Mr Bloom flared when he insisted that sending aid to Africa was tantamount to treason. 

He added: ‘How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month, when we’re in this sort of debt, to Bongo Bongo land is completely beyond me.’ 

He claimed foreign leaders frittered the money away on ‘Ray-Ban sunglasses, apartments in Paris and Ferraris’.

Nigeria’s space programme started in 2003 but its first satellite lost power and disappeared from orbit.

It now has three in space, NigComSat-1R, NigeriaSat-2 and Nigeria-Sat X, the first to be constructed by Nigerian engineers.

Although it has bought its own satellites and launched on Russian rockets, Nigeria has built laboratories which it hopes will produce its own space craft by 2028.

The National Space Research and Development Agency confirmed Nigerian astronauts should be trained and ready for space travel within two years. 

In July this year, NASRDA’s director general, Professor Seidu Onailo Mohammed, declared: ‘By our road map we are supposed to have astronauts prepared by 2015. Before the end of the year, the recruitment of astronauts will begin so that we have them handy and as soon as we get the nod we can pick from that number.’ 

The Nigerian government has not released detailed figures on how much it is spending on its space programme, but it is thought to be hundreds of millions of pounds a year. British aid to Nigeria will increase by 116 per cent under the Coalition government, from £141million in 2010/11 to £305million in 2014/15. It amounts to a total of £1.14billion over five years.

SOURCE- DAILY MAIL UK