The Minister of Works Senator David Umahi succeeded in planning a coup against Nigerians when last week, he got President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the whole apparatus of government to join him in commissioning the completed 30 kilometre portion of the 700 kilometer Lagos- Calabar Coastal highway. I know you will easily agree with me once you look at the share incongruence involved. A contractor has only delivered 30 kilometres of a 700 km road, and we are rolling out the drums? But our elders have said it all, the rat’s limb is at long as the rat itself. The minister was mandated to deliver something for the president to commission and all he could showcase is the bit of the work done on the Lagos-Calabar highway. He got his feel anyway, the road is dear to the president’s heart, and he won’t have to board a plane or a helicopter to get to the location. So Umahi was happy he was able to pull the attention of the entire nation to Lekki, Lagos, to commission an assignment he has only delivered about two per cent.
Anyway, what Umahi achieved through that commissioning exercise was to tell the whole nation that he and his officials have practically been sleeping on duty since he got appointed into the ministry. The job of the minister of works is to showcase infrastructure delivery by an administration. I have, however, remained unimpressed with the ministers who have held that portfolio since the progressives took the mantle in 2015. You first had Babatunde Raji Fashola, the former governor of Lagos State, who spent eight years on the seat under President Muhammadu Buhari but could only regale us with datelines for completion of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, which was started by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2013. Countless datelines that would ordinarily qualify for a record in the Guinness World Record books were reeled out by Fashola, and he eventually left that road uncompleted after eight years on the job.
His successor, Umahi, has also done two years on the job, and the Lagos-Ibadan Road has remained uncompleted. As the Eid-il Kabir was approaching, we got reminded again that the snail speed contractors are still on duty on that road as stories of commuters spending seven, eight hours to navigate what is supposed to take a little over one hour hit the airwaves. As we speak, no one knows when the road will be eventually delivered. Maybe at the tail end of President Tinubu’s first term in office. Talk of a ministry’s poor service delivery, talk of Nigeria’s Ministry of Works.
If you ask me what evidence do I have to make the above assertion, I will show you plenty. Some would say that Minister Umahi did roll out a long list of projects the day he appeared at the ministerial scorecard briefing, yes, he did. But what did we the citizens hear him say? He was talking about procurement done, not job completed. Some projects were at five per cent completion rate and many are suffering from lack of funds. He mentioned only two roads in the South- West, the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa Expressway and the Ilesa-Akure-Benin road but ended up merely appealing for funds. That is despite the ministry getting over N1 trillion (N1.03 trillion) allocation in the 2024 budget and another N2 trillion in the 2025 appropriation. Instead of giving us an account of how his ministry had spent the allocations, he was busy reeling out the procurements and asking for more.
I was pressed to take a deeper look at the performance of Minister Umahi in the Works Ministry after undertaking some road trips between March and early May this year and I concluded that the ministry was indeed sleeping on duty. In April, I was in Lagos and journeyed the way all through Ibadan, Oyo, Ogbomoso and Ilorin. It was, to say, the least nightmarish. We experienced some bumpy sections on the Lagos-Ibadan Road as the contractor would not just complete the Ibadan end of the road. Inside Ibadan, you can bypass the stress by taking the inner city routes. But Ibadan to Oyo was a journey through hell. I called friends who earlier traveled to Oyo to celebrate the installation of the Alaafin of Oyo, and I was told that the expressway had been abandoned as travelers had reverted to the old single lane road. A journey that should take 30 minutes from Ojoo in Ibadan took us two hours. We were practically crawling as there was no space to do a straight 40 km per hour. Trucks were competing for the little space that cars needed to maneuver, and commotion was the only thing to contend with. How can a government allow its road to deteriorate to this level? The road was worse than a footpath. I last witnessed such degradation of a highway on a trip through the Enugu-Port- Harcourt Expressway some years back. One of the lanes on the road was completely shut down and had been overgrown by a near thick forest. At one point, we saw a maize farm right on the portion that was once called the expressway. I also once saw the Enugu-Awka Road grow to that level of degradation. But the level of destruction on a road that was completed some 20 years back is sickening and shocking. By the way, I hope the road issue was raised when Alaafin Akeem Owoade visited President Bola Tinubu in the Villa recently. I know that the Alaafin, too, had joined the crew of travelers navigating the Oyo-Ibadan route via the old road, so he shouldn’t miss the opportunity. Let us remind Umahi that the road people now take to Oyo town was commissioned in the immediate post-colonial era as the so-called new road has been overtaken by an avalanche of gullies. Outside Oyo town, you can permit the state of the Oyo-Ogbomoso road section of the Ibadan-Ilorin expressway because the ministry of works had only recently terminated and re-awarded the contract, but it was a case of in and out of holes and gullies and when you embark on the Ogbomoso-Ilorin section of the road that was flagged off and completed by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, you would think that the road was more than 50 years old. Huge craters that could send unsuspecting drivers to early graves litter the stretch. I was told it was even better to use the old road on that axis than ply the expressway.
I’ve looked through the South-West of Nigeria, the zone that produced the president, and I cannot talk of any major road that is under reconstruction in a way that would influence life positively. From Lagos to Abeokuta, to Ibadan, to Osogbo, to Ile-Ife, Ilesa, Akure, Ado Ekiti and Ondo, there are no roads to show the people that their son cares about how they commune or move farm produce here and there. If Umahi is busy showcasing the Lagos-Calabar Road, and commissioning the Lagos-Lagos section in two years, how long will it take him to get to the collapsed roads that served us before now? Did anyone tell him that those who would vote in the much touted 2027 election are all resident on the Lagos-Calabar Road?
Sometime ago, I saw a story indicating that the Federal Government was planning a road that would connect Abuja to Lagos and reduce travel time by more than five hours. Somehow, that news was allowed to filter away, somewhat like fake news, even though a company put its name to it, what is happening to that kind of project? Why is the Ministry largely silent on the Sokoto-Badagry Road project? And if Minister Umahi’s ministry is cash strapped, what happened to the infrastructure concessioning idea. Sometime ago, the Obajana-Kabba road was concessioned to Dangote Industries as part of a Tax-relief measure, that road has since been completed and it is serving travelers. I wonder why the Federal Government would not want to build a road that would take commuters straight from Abuja to Lagos. Right now, there is no direct link between Lagos and Abuja except by air. A friend who has phobia for air travels was toying with the idea of road travel to Ibadan from Abuja, some weeks back, he told me that a policeman warned him thrice never to contemplate it because of a nasty experience he (the policeman) had in February. They said the Ibillo-Okene axis is permanently abandoned because the ‘bad boys’ have taken over that corner, while the Akungba-Akoko-Kabba route, which commuters reverted to has since collapsed. I know that the experience of the South-West people in terms of bad and collapsed road infrastructure is not different from what is ongoing in the South-South, the South-East, and the three zones of the North. And if every section of the country is reeling under the pang of bad roads and all our works minister can offer is the 30 km on the Lagos-Calabar end, it may just be convenient to conclude that this David would be unable to kill the Goliat called poor road infrastructure in Nigeria.
(Published by Sunday Tribune June 8, 2025)
