I have been watching David Umahi for a long time. I did not want to write this piece on the strength of his manners alone, because bad manners are not a crime in Nigeria, otherwise half the cabinet would be in Kuje.
But the record has now grown too long, and too consistent, for a man who sits on one of the largest spending portfolios in the Federal Republic.
It is time the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission did its job, if it still remembers what that job is.
Let me start with the money, because that is where every Nigerian story begins.
Reinforced Global Resources Limited: The Umahi Connection
On 25 September 2026, BusinessDay published an investigation into a company called Reinforced Global Resources Limited.
Its managing director, Joshua Okoro, was a student leader who publicly campaigned for Umahi’s senatorial run in Ebonyi in January 2023, telling students that their support would be reciprocated.
Months later Umahi was made Minister of Works.
According to BusinessDay’s reading of the federal GovSpend platform, Reinforced Global Resources then received ₦60.1 billion from the Ministry of Works in 27 payments between April 2024 and May 2026, with no other federal client on its books, and no federal contract of any kind in the thirteen years before Umahi took the ministry.
The paper found advance payments on the Enugu–Abakaliki–Ogoja road released in quick succession before progress certificates appeared, and it argued that the Public Procurement Act’s 15 per cent cap on mobilisation and its disclosure rule on political relationships were both breached.
BusinessDay says it wrote to the ministry and the company on 24 August and received no reply from either.
That is not an accusation from a blogger. That is a national business newspaper citing the government’s own spending records.
If the EFCC can arraign a company’s managing director in Enugu, as it did in July 2026 over $600,000 in cash paid for a stone-crushing line sold to a joint venture that included this same Reinforced Global Resources, then it can ask the Minister of Works why the one contractor named in that case became his ministry’s favourite.
The firm in that EFCC case, Brass Engineering, was founded and chaired by Umahi himself until 2011.
He resigned from it the same year Reinforced Global Resources was incorporated. I draw no conclusion. I ask the question, and I want it answered under oath.
Now the coastal highway, which he oversees, and which has been the subject of my writing for a year.
Umahi and the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway
The Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway was handed to Hitech Construction, a Chagoury company, without competitive bidding.
Umahi told Nigerians in 2023 that Hitech would fund it. He later told Nigerians it would cost ₦4 billion a kilometre.
Other figures have since been given. Atiku Abubakar called it a highway to fraud.
This week the Human Rights Writers Association (WURIWA) asked the National Assembly to summon Umahi over the decision to divert roughly 104 kilometres of the route onto the existing East–West Road, with a 45-kilometre bypass and sections to be raised two metres, a change announced after the contract was signed and after the money started moving.
Yesterday Adams Oshiomhole, a senator of the ruling party, accused the minister of bias in how road money is allocated.
When a project has no public contract, no fixed price, a contractor chosen without a tender, and a route that changes after award, the question is not whether it should be audited. The question is why it has not been.
And here I must say what I saw with my own eyes. I watched the video of this minister at a public event with Gilbert Chagoury, the man whose company holds that contract.
I watched a Nigerian minister of the Federal Republic hug and bow to a foreign contractor the way a houseboy greets the master.
My father sat at the United Nations as an Under-Secretary-General. He never bowed to a contractor in his life. Who works for whom in that ministry?
Mary Habila
Then there is the matter of a young woman called Mary Habila.
On 27 June 2026, Mary Habila, aged 26, part of the minister’s medical team, was found dead in a room within the compound of his country home at Uburu.
The Ebonyi police transferred the case to the State CID. The minister says he suspects no foul play and himself called for an autopsy.
Her family rejected one and asked a court to stop the investigation.
The police insisted, engaged a pathologist, and by late August Daily Trust reported that an autopsy had been done and a report was ready.
She was then buried quietly in southern Kaduna, and her own community says it has never been told what the report found.
I accuse the minister of nothing in her death. But a girl died in a minister’s house and the country has been told nothing.
Where is the autopsy report? Who is sitting on it? That silence is contempt, and in Nigeria contempt for the dead is usually a rehearsal for contempt for the living.
Tracy Ohiri
Add to that the businesswoman Tracy Ohiri, who said the minister owed her roughly ₦250 million from old dealings and who found herself arrested and arraigned for defamation, a sequence that brought protesters to the gates of the ministry in March.
Civil debts are settled in civil courts. When a minister’s creditor ends up in a police cell, we are no longer discussing roads.
Now the family business.
Osborn Umahi
In August, Osborn Umahi, the minister’s 28-year-old first son, who the minister’s own party describes as running his father’s business interests, was declared chairman of Ohaozara Local Government Area, the minister’s home council.
In the election, the APC was the only party on the ballot and swept all 13 chairmanships and all 171 councillor seats.
The minister’s response, delivered during a highway inspection, was to boast that he had killed the PDP in Ebonyi and would never let it come back.
He then told the world it was not true that he had made his son a chairman; the governor did it as a gesture of gratitude to him.
I will let the reader judge whether that is a denial or a confession.
This brings me to the manners.
Rufai Oseni
On live television last October, asked a simple question by Rufai Oseni of Arise about what the coastal highway costs per kilometre, the minister could not give the number.
Instead he told the journalist he was too small to be reported to the President and called himself a professor of engineering, a title he conceded he had awarded himself by experience.
This is the pattern: when challenged, he does not answer, he diminishes.
This week an association of Ebonyi indigenes gave him 72 hours to apologise for remarks against Peter Obi.
A man who speaks to his own people like that is telling you exactly how he regards the Treasury.
Disclaimer
I have no personal quarrel with David Umahi. I have never met him. Nothing I write is personal; it is politics.
But I did my National Service in the Presidency and the National Assembly and I swore then that if corruption ever returned to swallow this country I would not keep quiet.
It has, and I will not.
The Kio Solution demands five things:
- One. The EFCC should open a formal investigation into every payment made by the Federal Ministry of Works to Reinforced Global Resources Limited since April 2024, the mobilisation paid before progress certificates, and the minister’s past and present relationship with its owners and with Brass Engineering.
- Two. The full Hitech contract for the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway, the price per kilometre, the financing terms and the file approving the East–West Road realignment should be published, and the National Assembly should summon the minister as HURIWA has asked.
- Three. The autopsy report on Mary Habila should be released to her family and to the public, and a coroner’s inquest convened, as Omoyele Sowore has demanded.
- Four. The minister’s Code of Conduct asset declarations, as governor and as minister, should be published. If he has nothing to hide, he loses nothing.
- Five. The Isabel Precedent. The diaspora should take this record to the agencies and courts of the countries where any proceeds may sit. What Angola did to Isabel dos Santos, Nigeria’s rulers should expect.
The allegations in this piece are allegations.
The minister has denied wrongdoing in the Habila matter and has not been charged with any offence; BusinessDay’s findings are reported as its findings.
But a man who sits on ₦3.4 trillion of road money and answers no letters, no journalists and no citizens has forfeited the benefit of the doubt.
Investigate him. Now! Nigeria belongs to Nigerians.
Kio Amachree
Stockholm
