The Iwere Engineers Forum (IEF) has urged President Bola Tinubu to immediately intervene in the reported plan to divert some sections of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway away from the Atlantic coastline as the route approaches major Ilaje communities in Ondo State and the Itsekiri coastal belt in Delta State.
IEF said the engineering concerns cited by the Ministry of Works in the Ondo and Delta corridors, including deep peat, weak soils and large water crossings, were not sufficient justification for abandoning the areas.
In a statement, the forum’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Professor Ogbemi Omatete; Vice Chairman, Gbesimi Akperi; General Secretary, Dr Silver Ejejigbe; and members Kunu Harmony, Dr Felix U. Atakere and Jude Pemu, said modern engineering offered multiple solutions, including corridor optimisation, strategic setbacks from the active shoreline, pile-supported embankments, viaducts, long-span bridges, staged consolidation, vertical drains, lightweight fills, deep foundations, advanced geotechnical monitoring and climate-resilient drainage.
They urged the President to direct an immediate, independent comparative review of the Ondo-Delta alignment and make relevant alignment drawings, chainages, geotechnical assessments, bridge assumptions and comparative life-cycle cost evidence available to affected stakeholders, subject to legitimate security and procurement restrictions.
They also called for the establishment of a joint technical working group involving the Federal Ministry of Works, relevant environmental and maritime agencies, the Ondo and Delta state governments, qualified independent engineers, including IEF, and representatives of affected coastal communities.
The statement reads: “Our position is straightforward: a national project conceived, named and justified as a Coastal Highway should, subject to sound engineering and environmental safeguards, remain functionally coastal.
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“It should run broadly parallel to the Atlantic coastline and directly unlock the coastal settlements, ports, jetties, fisheries, industrial locations and blue-economy assets for which such a corridor is uniquely valuable.
“Inland cities and state capitals can and should be connected to the trunk coastal corridor by high-quality strategic spurs and interchanges.
“The trunk road itself should not have to abandon the coastal development belt merely to provide access that can be achieved through connectors.
“We acknowledge that the Federal Ministry of Works has publicly cited serious engineering concerns in the Ondo and Delta corridors, including deep peat, weak soils and large water crossings.
“IEF does not dismiss those concerns. Our concern is that they should not become reasons to abandon the coastal development objective before a transparent, independently verifiable comparison of viable set-back and hybrid coastal alignments has been completed.
“Modern engineering provides multiple responses: corridor optimisation, strategic setbacks from the active shoreline, pile-supported embankments, viaducts, long-span bridges, staged consolidation, vertical drains, lightweight fills, deep foundations, advanced geotechnical monitoring and climate-resilient drainage.
“The appropriate engineering question is therefore not whether the road must sit on the beach. It should not.
“The question is whether a resilient Atlantic-facing corridor, generally set back from the active shoreline and locally adjusted around exceptional geotechnical, ecological and navigational constraints, can maintain direct access to the Ilaje and Itsekiri coastal belt.
“We submit that this alternative deserves full feasibility-level investigation before the coastal corridor is foreclosed.
“The coastal road idea in this axis has deep historical roots. Public historical accounts of the late Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh record the planning of the Koko-Ogheye motor road, while later accounts describe the Koko-Ogheye-Epe concept as a coastal connection intended to shorten travel between Lagos and the Niger Delta.
“The Koko port facilities, Escravos navigation and other maritime infrastructure formed part of the same broader development vision.
“We therefore respectfully urge that today’s Lagos-Calabar project preserve, rather than bypass, the strategic maritime logic of connecting the Atlantic economic belt.
“Coastal and deltaic highways are difficult infrastructure projects, but they are not unprecedented.
“Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development, for example, is replacing a vulnerable portion of LA 1 through sensitive coastal wetlands with an approximately 18-mile elevated highway because the existing route is affected by subsidence, erosion and flooding.
“The lesson is not that Nigeria should copy another country blindly; it is that modern highway engineering can maintain critical coastal access through weak wetland environments where the strategic case justifies the investment.
“Nigeria should subject the Ilaje-Itsekiri alternatives to the same disciplined engineering test.
“There is also a relevant Nigerian precedent within the same Niger Delta coastal environment. The Chevron Escravos Terminal is served by an established asphalt runway in the Escravos coastal belt, constructed and operated on low-lying deltaic terrain and used for regular personnel and logistics flights, including aircraft in approximately the 100-passenger class.
“Its long-standing operation demonstrates that major transport infrastructure can be engineered and maintained in this difficult coastal setting.
“IEF therefore recommends that the comparative study obtain and review available geotechnical, pavement, ground-improvement, drainage and maintenance records for the Escravos runway as a Nigerian benchmark.
“The precise equivalence of its soil strata to those at any proposed highway chainage should, of course, be confirmed through site-specific geotechnical investigations.
“The weak-soil argument must also be considered in its wider Niger Delta context. Soft, compressible clay, organic deposits, peat, high groundwater levels and swamp conditions are not unique to the Ilaje-Itsekiri axis; similarly difficult foundation conditions occur extensively across the Bayelsa and Rivers coastal and deltaic belts, through which a genuinely coastal Lagos-Calabar corridor must ultimately pass.
“Diverting substantially inland whenever weak coastal soil is encountered would progressively convert the project from an Atlantic coastal highway into an inland highway. It could also increase travel distances and times between Lagos and the South-South coastal economic belt.
“The engineering objective should therefore be to optimise the coastal alignment and apply appropriate ground-improvement, piled, elevated or hybrid solutions where justified, rather than treating difficult but regionally characteristic terrain as an automatic reason to abandon the coast.
“Importantly, the coastal engineering geology and geotechnical challenges are regionally comparable from Ondo through Delta, Bayelsa and Rivers to the Cross River coastal belt. Although site-specific soil conditions vary and must be verified through boreholes and surveys, the same reasoning used to divert the highway inland in Ondo could repeatedly push it inland through Bayelsa, Rivers and ultimately Cross River State.
“Such successive diversions would progressively undermine the intended Atlantic and coastal function and could increase travel distances between Lagos and the South-South rather than provide the most direct coastal connection.
“Modern highway and bridge engineering provides alternative methods for transferring structural loads through weak soils, reducing embankment settlement and maintaining road elevations above flood levels.
“The engineering question should therefore not be whether a highway can be constructed through such terrain, but rather: Which foundation and superstructure system provides the best combination of safety, constructability, environmental protection, whole-life cost and long-term reliability?
“Many communities along this coast face chronic erosion, flooding and shoreline retreat. The highway programme offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to combine transportation access with a coordinated coastal-resilience programme.
“The scope should therefore include shoreline-risk mapping, beach and dune management where appropriate, revetments or other protective structures only where coastal-process modelling supports them, drainage and flood-resilience works, and permanent access routes capable of transporting rock, armour units, piling equipment and emergency materials to threatened coastlines.
“Road access can dramatically improve the logistics of constructing and maintaining shoreline protection.
“A true Atlantic corridor can connect coastal industrial zones, jetties, fisheries, marine logistics bases, fabrication facilities, energy infrastructure and future ports to the national road network.
“It can reduce the cost of moving heavy equipment and manufactured goods between inland markets and coastal loading and offloading points.
“Properly planned interchanges can create new industrial clusters without forcing heavy traffic through traditional settlements.
“The corridor can support fisheries, aquaculture, cold-chain logistics, marine services, tourism, ports, offshore energy support, ship repair, coastal manufacturing and other blue-economy activities.
“These benefits should be quantified through a formal socioeconomic and transport-economic study, but excluding coastal communities from direct road access risks leaving precisely the maritime economy that a coastal highway could unlock outside the project’s main development corridor.
“Direct road access can materially improve the speed and reliability of police, civil defence, fire, ambulance, disaster-response and maritime-security operations in isolated coastal settlements.
“A continuous coastal corridor would also provide evacuation and relief-distribution capacity during flooding and other emergencies.
“Communications ducts, fibre, power infrastructure and emergency lay-bys could be integrated into the right-of-way, strengthening both civilian resilience and legitimate security operations.
“Road and fibre connectivity can reduce the isolation of coastal schools, health centres and communities; improve access to universities and technical training; make it easier for teachers, doctors and skilled personnel to serve the region; and allow digital services and telecommunications infrastructure to reach communities that are currently expensive to connect.
“Better mobility can also make participation in lawful civic, administrative and political processes easier by reducing geographic isolation.
“Construction and long-term operation can create opportunities in civil works, marine logistics, surveying, maintenance, hospitality, fisheries logistics, fabrication, security support and other services.
“This should be accompanied by transparent local-content programmes, skills certification and apprenticeships so that host communities participate not merely as observers but as trained contributors to the infrastructure economy.
“IEF strongly supports the development of Edo State, inland Ondo and inland Delta. This need not be an either-or proposition. Strategic spurs can connect Igbokoda and other Ondo centres, Edo economic nodes, Warri, Koko and other inland locations to the coastal trunk road.
“A hierarchy of a trunk highway and connecting spurs can deliver both coastal transformation and inland accessibility without sacrificing the defining coastal function of the Lagos-Calabar project.
“The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway has the potential to become one of the defining infrastructure legacies of this administration.
“That legacy will be strongest if future generations can see a continuous national Atlantic development corridor that opens previously isolated coastal communities to commerce, security, education, healthcare, communications and industry while protecting vulnerable shorelines.
“A road that runs substantially inland across a major coastal region may still be a valuable highway, but it would not deliver the same coastal-development benefits to the communities it bypasses.”
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