Oyo State Governor and Allied Peoples Movement (APM) presidential candidate, Seyi Makinde, has questioned the Federal Government’s spending priorities, demanding to know how major projects such as the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and the Presidential Initiative on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) would ease the hardship faced by Nigerians.
Makinde spoke on Tuesday at the APM Presidential Campaign Organisation’s South-South Town Hall Meeting in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, where he criticised what he described as the government’s preference for mega-projects without clear evidence of benefits for ordinary citizens.
“I have also told them, ‘You cannot keep complicating the lives of Nigerians’. Everything from them is mega.
“They want to do a superhighway from where to where? They want to do mega this and mega that,” the APM presidential candidate said.
He also questioned the impact of the government’s CNG initiative and the Naira-for-Crude policy on transport costs, arguing that the policies had yet to deliver the relief Nigerians expected.
“There’s a Presidential Initiative on CNG, it came to nothing. ‘Naira for Crude’ came to nothing. Has it translated to lower costs of transportation for millions of Nigerians?” he asked.
The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, a flagship project of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, is designed to run for about 700 kilometres along Nigeria’s coastline, connecting Lagos in the South-West to Calabar in Cross River State, near the border with Cameroon.
The project is intended to improve transportation links and support tourism, but its cost and long-term sustainability have attracted public debate.
Critics have raised concerns about the project’s viability amid rising living costs and the effects of rising sea levels and coastal erosion along the Gulf of Guinea.
Tinubu, however, previously described the highway as a road that would “outlive all of us here” during the inauguration of its first section.
Makinde also criticised the Federal Government’s proposed price modulation policy for petroleum products, introduced more than three years after the removal of petrol subsidy.
“So now they say they want to modulate the price of petroleum products. They want to modulate the lives of millions of Nigerians.
“They want to modulate the destiny of the most populous Black nation on the face of the Earth,” he said.
The governor challenged the government to publish the pricing framework behind the proposed policy, arguing that greater transparency would allow Nigerians with relevant expertise to assess the figures and offer practical solutions.
“My question is very simple. Let’s assume that we are not evil, we’re not smart I’m not saying we’re smart but provide for Nigerians your pricing template.
We will see Nigerians that can tell us how to make it work for millions of Nigerians. So don’t complicate things and say, ‘This policy, that policy, we want to modulate the prices.’
“Give us the template. Once we have the template, we can point out the real figures and tell you how to make this thing work for millions of Nigerians.”
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