Our coastal road has lost its coast

A road “starting somewhere and ending nowhere!” That was how Lasisi Olagunju, Nigerian Tribune columnist, described President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway when it was launched in March 2024.

Now, the government itself has clothed the columnist in the costume of a clairvoyant. What its praise singers dismissed as the cynicism of a troublesome pen is returning as an admission from the minister supervising the project. David Umahi, who said, a few days ago, that the highway would leave the coast after Ogun State, turn inland towards Edo State and link up with the East-West Road. The road has changed direction; the warning has found its mark.

In his April 29, 2024 column, titled “Sending Ooni to Tinubu”, Olagunju questioned the wisdom of the ₦15.6 trillion, 700-kilometre undertaking. Two years and seven months later, the government owes Nigerians something more substantial than applause for its latest change of mind.

Umahi calls the diversion “an excellent engineering choice by Mr President”. But that praise opens a trench of questions: What engineering informed the original choice? Who surveyed the terrain? What did they find before the government committed public money to a route it now says presents formidable obstacles?

I hope my English is not failing me. In the Nigeria of President Tinubu and his ‘Professor-in-practice’ Minister of Works, Umahi, anything fails. Or should I have said everything fails? The “coastal” in Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway is an adjective; it tells us where the highway belongs. Now that the road is heading inland, the government appears determined to leave its name beside the sea. But the missing coast is the smallest part of this confusion.

Nigerians need to know what remains of the original promise, what the revised route will cost and why difficulties that should have informed the design are being presented more than two years later as discoveries. A government cannot sell a coastal dream, deliver an inland detour and expect the public to bridge the distance with applause.

I checked the dictionary for the meaning of ‘coastal’. The entry says: “The word coastal is an adjective that means located on, near, bordering, or relating to a coast.” Coast is also defined as “the land next to an ocean or sea”. By the definitions, the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway will be defined as a road constructed near or through a coast; that is near the ocean or sea.

When the project was announced in March 2024, not a few Nigerians concluded that it was another ‘white elephant’ project of a wasteful government. Some poets and writers can be very brutal. Matthew Wills, a poet and contributing reporter for the New York-based journal, Brooklyn Rail, defines the phrase, ‘white elephant’, as “something excessive that turns out to be valueless.”

We are in October 2026. Two years and seven months after the illusion called Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway started, both Wills and Olagunju have been justified in their brutal definitions of the waste! The super coastal highway has not just become another ‘white elephant’ project of this locust administration; it has indeed turned out to be a road from ‘somewhere to nowhere!’

Umahi has been trending on social media for negative reasons. The self-acclaimed ‘Professor of Road Engineering’ has been explaining the “excellent engineering choice by Mr. President” on why the road is taking a detour from the coast to the mainland to a bewildered citizenry. Annoyingly, even after that disclosure, he kept referring to the road as ‘Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway!’

I watched the video a couple of times. On each occasion, I kept asking who taught Umahi grammar.

What is Umahi saying in the first instance? How come that it took him and his professorship in ’Road Engineering’ almost three years to realise that taking the road through the coast of Ondo State would make it “pass through a terrain that you have over 100 metres of pits deep?” How come, again, that it took him over two and half years to realise that he has “no defined sharp sand to 300 metres?” And what sort of public official would ask those protesting if anybody wanted him to pass through that terrain? What arrogance; what impudence! Who talks this way?

How did his ministry arrive at the project in the first instance? Who did the engineering design? Who got the contract to execute the project? Who carried out the visibility study for the project? What about the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report? How did the Tinubu-led government arrive at the N15.6 trillion costs for the project when the Minister of Works is ignorant of the existence of the just-discovered ‘over 100 metres of pits deep’ in Ondo State alone? And now that we are having a detour from the coast to the mainland, what happens to the original design and what effects will the detour have on the overall health of the road?

This can only happen in Nigeria. And it is sad for all of us! Before the project was thrown at us, there was no verifiable bidding exercise for it. We asked for nothing, and nothing was presented to us! No Bill of quantity was presented to the public, yet our patrimony was deployed to finance the scam! All we heard was that a presidential fiat had awarded the N15.6 trillion contract to Hitech Construction Company Limited owned by President Tinubu’s business partner and friend, Gilbert Chagoury!

The entire cry about Tinubu’s son, Seyi, being on the Board of Hitech Construction Company Limited fell on deaf ears. The National Assembly under the leadership of the pliant Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, which ordinarily should have interrogated such malfeasance, became deaf, dumb and blind at the same time! A section of the media, which today is lamenting that journalism had gone to the dogs, was commissioned to raise the Hallelujah chorus in praise of the project!

Tinubu and his goons got away with the murder. A few months later, the government organised a jamboree and invited our dear Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka and other dignitaries to ‘commission’ the ‘completed’ 30-kilometre section of the road on May 31, 2025. Now, a year and three months later, Umahi is telling us about the detour from the coast of Ondo State to the hinterland of Edo State through the East-West Road and to terminate at ‘nowhere!’

READ ALSO: Lagos-Calabar coastal highway not wasteful project, Umahi slams critics

The attempt to get Umahi to put a figure for each kilometre of the road was met with arrogance. He told his interviewers on national television that they knew nothing about road construction. We were all scandalised by that level of impudence from a public servant. Two years later, Umahi, the Professor of Road Engineering, has now expressed crass ignorance of the existence of over 100 pits in Ondo State.

So, now that the road is no longer a coastal road, will the initial cost still remain? Or, because of the galloping inflation in the country caused by the voodoo economic policies of the Tinubu administration, will the cost go up? These and many more are the questions Nigerians are asking Umahi to explain with his “an excellent engineering choice by Mr President” so that we all will know in which basket we are keeping our harvested corn.

I don’t know how the Hallelujah orchestra who hailed the now abandoned Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway as the best thing after Mungo Park ‘discovered’ River Niger feel now that the ‘coastal’ has gone missing from the road! How a government would abandon several federal highways begging for attention to go and sink money in the ocean in the name of a superhighway beats every sane reasoning. But this is Nigeria; a country where rogue hyenas preside over the affairs of decent people!

When a leader acts before he thinks, we cannot but have the type of present confusion as we are having in the ‘Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway’ diversion. In a society where decency and self-worth are not in short supply, Umahi, rather than speaking grammar over the detour the highway is taking, would have resigned. No sane society would tolerate such a figure and his bags of controversies a second more than necessary!

To whom do we cry then? Is Umahi’s appointing authority better off in terms of administrative acumen and morals? Is it not a case of the Yoruba local parlance of irú ìró ni ìborùn (the wrapper and the shoulder sleeve are of the same material)? How do we report an ignorant Minister of works, who did not realise that there are pits, gullies and mountains on the route of a big project like the highway in discourse, to a President who also failed to know that one must think about the ripple effects before making an extempore pronouncement of “subsidy is gone?”

Three years and five months after President Tinubu made that infamous declaration, his government has come out of coma to now donate a 30-day economic relief to the suffering Nigerians in the name of fuel price ‘modulation!’ This is the kind of confusion Nigerians have brought upon themselves when they allowed the self-entitled Èmilókàn exponent access to the federal seat of power.

I still don’t understand the wisdom of removing N15 from the pump price of petrol and the government expected us to go to our various worship centres and give testimony! How much was a litre of petrol when Tinubu was sworn in on May 29, 2023? How much do we buy a litre now? With a minimum wage of N70,000, how many litres will that buy at the rate of the new N1,350/litre? And to think that this 30-day largesse is limited to the NNPC Limited dispensing points! What happens to Nigerians living in towns and villages where there are no NNPC-controlled filling stations?

Again, after the initial 30 days, what follows? Why can’t this government take a cue from the Yoruba aphorism, tí o bá máa jé òsoko, jé òsoko; tí o bá máa jé Òsáká, jé Òsáká. Òsáká-òsoko kò ye Omolúàbí (just answer Òsoko straight if that suits it or Òsáká if that is preferable. Why the confusing Òsáká-òsoko of an appellation)?

Truth is that the removal of the subsidy in 2023 was the biggest error of this administration. The decision, Tinubu himself agreed, was taken in a feat of excitement of his taking the oath of office as President. In his sober moment, the President realised that it was an idea that should not have come on the spur of the moment the way it happened! The immediate reaction of the market system is what has driven Nigerians to the bottomless pit of poverty.

And there is nothing wrong in making a mistake. The President and his handlers must know that. Rene Descartes opines that error occurs when humans, in their free will, hurriedly take positions on matters without the right intellectual judgement. This position was amplified by Buddhists, who reasoned that mistakes are offshoots of ‘fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance of how reality works.’

Now that Tinubu has realised the folly of his hasty action on the removal of oil subsidy without corresponding palliative instruments to cushion the effects, rather than another scum of 30-day price ‘modulation’, he should come up with a lasting solution to the reign of poverty, want and deprivation ravaging the land.

This goes to Minister Umahi too. The ‘coastal’ in the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway is now an aberration with the detour from Ogun to Edo and the East-West Road. Having passed that initial stage of ignorance, the Professor of Road Engineering should tell us the new name for the highway. He should also tell us the new cost of the road now that it is no longer ‘coastal’ in nature and delivery.

Minister Umahi should know that while the President’s directive to detour to the existing East-West route was one of his “happiest days”, venturing into that project,  the utmost secrecy this administration has displayed has turned the venture into  one of the darkest spots of our history as a nation. Umahi cannot be happy while the country is sad. Ko nice nao!