This is bigger than the Coastal Road mess
This project was always a ruse. A hoax. Because sadly, that is the DNA of Nigeria’s ruling All Progressives Congress.
The Bola Tinubu government consistently reports and returns failures and collapse because it was never intended to be an achiever. It was never built to deliver.
In the Bible, Jesus draws close attention to the folly of a man who builds his house on sand. APC was built on lies, and lies, while they may travel fast, never travel far. That is why the giant Coastal Highway plan has now collapsed. Right in front of the entire world.
Like several other people, I could see the horizon. I called it “fiction.”
That was in April 2024, when this particular lie was being marketed, notably by the garrulous Works Minister David Umahi, I wrote a two-part story (I and II) in which I invited him to look at himself in a big mirror while I explored the condition in which he would leave Nigerian roads.
I concluded: “Of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, about which a controversy has erupted, I say this: Enugu-Onitsha, East-West, Kano-Maiduguri, Lagos-Ibadan, Abuja-Kano. These are highways. Buhari’s Abuja-Lagos Greenfield Expressway? That was an April fool. Tinubu’s N15.6 trillion, eight-year, 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway with a yet-to-be-costed train to nowhere in particular in the middle? At N15.6 trillion, just for the road, that is fiction.”
Umahi made a choice. He did not invest in that mirror. He did not borrow one. Did not look either at the past, at his family or into his legacy.
Six months after that, we could not find his Lokoja-Benin City Road. And here we are, two and a half years later, and he has still not built it. Umahi, like his predecessor-Minister, Babatunde Fashola, had lied not only about his capacity and competence, but about his goodwill. The myth and farce of Fashola live after him.
So, no Nigerian who was really paying attention should have been deceived by the Coastal Highway swindle. I wrote about the fall of the APC nearly 10 years ago, and identified its unethical bent in 2020.
If we are talking strictly about roads and the Tinubu administration, it inherited 2,604 major road projects valued at approximately N13 trillion, to which it added 65 new projects. Owing to subsidy removal and devaluation of the naira, the total liability ballooned to about N20 trillion. Of that figure, only about 9.7 per cent of 2025 in capital releases had been paid, even as Umahi made wild promises to legislators this year, with contractors being owed about N2.2 trillion.
The cost scandal? According to BusinessDay, under Tinubu, Nigeria now spends an average of N3.7 billion ($2.31 million) per kilometre of road, making it the nation with the most expensive roads in Africa. Egypt spends $1.6 million, Kenya between $300,000 and $1 million, and South Africa as low as $200,000. At N4 billion/k, the Coastal Highway was costing more than the combined 2024 budgets of Nigeria’s 36 states.
There is worse news: most federal roads constructed in the last six years have experienced failure within the first six months to two years, according to a study, with pavement thickness being only 30 per cent to 60 per cent of calculated requirements.
The Enugu-Abakaliki road, constructed by the Ebonyi State government under Governor Umahi between 2022 and 2023 (at a massive cost of N1.589 billion), began showing failure less than three months after completion. Umahi had claimed that concrete technology—the same one he inflicted on the Coastal Highway—would last 50-100 years.
There are other reasons why the Coastal Highway collapse is not just scandalous, but insulting. One of them is that it was supposed to have been easy, or at least easier, than the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Rail project that was used as a cover.
APC came into power pledging to build that within two years, renegotiated the contract, but did nothing. It would become the symbolic “rail in the middle” of the Coastal Road scheme.
In March 2024, I mourned the Coastal Rail. I should perhaps have more appropriately wept for a sector that was in delirium and decay. For instance, between May 2015 and May 2023, the government approved over $1.3 billion in consultancy and supervision services contracts—not the projects—including one for $328.87 million announced in February 2022 by Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi. Over $1.3m! Fat consultancies exchanged hands, but where are the projects, APC?
That is why this is not the story of the Coastal Road, or even of infrastructure. It is a story of 12 years of malice aforethought:
- APC sold to Nigerians a promise of C-H-A-N-G-E. It chickened out.
- APC would arrest insecurity. Nigeria has become more insecure.
- APC would combat corruption. APC became corruption.
- APC (read its 2014 Manifesto), advertised education, medical care, infrastructure, three million jobs per year. None delivered.
- APC sold a vision of infrastructure. It completed the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and the rail line, and the Second Niger Bridge. Electricity, rail, and highways have otherwise become comprehensively fictitious.
- APC would lift 100 million out of poverty. But it lied instead.
- APC would end, or limit, the presidential fleet. Another fiction.
- APC promised to institutionalise free and fair elections at all levels.
No, this is not about the Coastal Road, a shame of a project that is now being emptied into a 20-year-old scandal, the East-West Road: another that Nigeria has repeatedly financed, redesigned and promised with no end in sight and no transparent accounting.
It will intersect with the A2 Highway, another fragmented, chaotic enterprise, part of which Umahi embarrassingly swore to build in six months.
In 2021, I wrote on this page that, contrary to the government claiming it would complete Abuja-Kano—part of the northern stretch of A2—before Buhari’s term ended in 2023, it would not. It did not; it was completed in 2025, which was the contractor’s target.
The lesson is that with this government, the Coastal Highway will similarly never be completed. This is guaranteed by its dubious ancestry, including flouting of all relevant regulations, and deeply limited research and engineering. Because while our problem poses as infrastructure, it is a different animal.
If you have seen the humiliating viral video of the young Nigerian who was caught taking a written examination for his retiring father, who is then brought in, you know the answer—I mean, question.
Because if they ask, “Where are the men in your family?” you don’t rush your response. This is the stretch of the highway in which I am reminded of the words of a certain prophet called Daniel Bwala forecasting the man he would worship.
With due respect to the children, I join forces with all Nigerians who are demanding an independent probe of this project.
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