TD Nigeria is committing as much as $13 billion to the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway.
The Minister of Works himself has put the price at roughly four billion naira per kilometre.
The contract went to Hitech Construction, a company of the Chagoury Group, whose owners have enjoyed a long and well-documented relationship with President Bola Tinubu.
There was no open international tender. No competing bids were published.
No evidence was ever placed before Nigerians showing that this was the best price the country could obtain.
The full contract, the payment schedule, the performance targets and the independent engineering reports remain locked away from the public that is paying for them.
And yet the government expects applause.
Let me be clear. Nobody disputes that Nigeria needs good roads.
The question is whether this road, at this price, from this contractor, is the best use of $13 billion at this moment in our history.
Millions of Nigerians cannot feed their families. Children sit in classrooms that are falling down.
Hospitals turn patients away for want of basic equipment. The lights still go out.
Kidnappers, terrorists and bandits roam freely across vast stretches of the country while police officers face them without vehicles, without radios, and sometimes without bullets.
Villages are left to defend themselves.
Against that backdrop, is a coastal highway really our greatest national priority?
Ask the question differently. How many teaching hospitals would $13 billion equip? How many schools would it rebuild?
How many police officers would it train, arm and pay properly?
How much power generation, irrigation, rail and food production would it finance? These are not rhetorical flourishes.
They are the choices a serious government makes every day, and this government made its choice.
Yes, Hitech is visibly building. Some 30 kilometres of Section One were opened with great ceremony in Lagos.
But the completion dates keep moving, the government has already gone abroad to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the project going.
Meanwhile, Nigerians still have not been given the independent information they would need to judge whether the road is on schedule, within budget, or delivering value for money.
We are asked to take it on trust.
The issue was never whether Hitech can pour concrete. Nobody doubts that.
The issue is why the country committed such an extraordinary sum without competition, and why the beneficiary is a company controlled by people so closely bound to the President.
Public infrastructure must never look like a private arrangement between friends.
If this highway is truly indispensable to Nigeria’s future, then prove it. Publish the feasibility study. Publish the complete contract.
Publish the rival proposals or explain why there were none.
Publish every payment, every variation order and every independent progress certificate.
Sunlight costs nothing, and a government confident in its numbers should welcome it.
Nigeria cannot keep borrowing billions for prestige projects while its citizens go hungry and its security architecture collapses.
A government’s first duties are to protect its people, feed its people, educate its children and keep its hospitals open.
Only when those duties are met has it earned the right to boast about monuments along the coastline.
Thirteen billion dollars. No competitive bid. A presidential ally. A nation that is hungry and afraid.
I do not think so.
