An orphan called the Benin City-Abuja Road

In the second half of the second term of one Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s leader, the records will show that he was particularly busy building roads.

In words, I mean, or contracts.  Among others:

• In January 2021, the government declared that it would complete the reconstruction of the Abuja-Kano Road (AKR) in 2023.
• In July, it awarded a contract worth N309 billion to Dangote Industries for the construction of five roads across the country.
• In August, Minister Babatunde Fashola, of Works and Housing, announced that the government was executing 800 contracts and 13,000kmof roads and bridges nationwide.
• In October, Fashola bragged to federal legislators about how well the Buhari administration had done on infrastructure, and promised that the Lagos/Ibadan expressway and the Second Niger Bridge would be completed in 2022. He said the focus of the 2022 budget was the completion of priority road projects, “especially those on route A1-A9, which lead to the ports and major agricultural hubs attracting vehicles carrying heavy goods in the zones.”
• In December 2021, Clem Agba, the Minister of State for Finance, Budget and National Planning, declared that the Buhari government completed 500 rural roads that year; I challenged him and Fashola to provide evidence, but they never did.
• On November 3, 2022, the government approved N506 billion for the contract for East-West road project sections 1-4 from Warri to Port Harcourt, Eket, Oron, elevating it from  N260 billion, bringing the total amount required for it to. The council approved another N140 billion worth of contracts for the rehabilitation, construction and reconstruction of some other unnamed roads in different parts of the country.
• On January 18, 2023, the government gave NNPC Limited the approval to invest N1.9 trillion on the reconstruction of 44 federal roads. It was in a programme presidential spokesman Laolu Akande called the reconstruction of selected federal roads under the federal government’s Road Infrastructure Development and Refurbishment Investment Tax Credit Policy phase 2 by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Limited and its subsidiaries.
• On April 5, 2023, the government approved459 billion for the Kaduna Eastern Bypass, and a N327.281 billion tax credit scheme for the construction of some roads in Kwara State.

Remember that in November 2022, Fashola also claimed that Buhari had constructed 8,352.94Kms of roads and created 339,955 jobs.  He declared that his rehabilitation of 12 major roads – spanning 896.187 kilometres, had reduced travel time in Nigeria by 56.20 per cent and added value to the people in the communities the roads pass through.

He bragged: “In these last seven and half years, the administration has been very resolute in the pursuit of progressivism, which is globally recognised as the improvement of the human condition,” adding that “life defining infrastructure” was “being completed or within the finish line.”

When Fashola made that “priority roads…especially those on route A1-A9” claim in 2021, I thought of A2.  If you did not know, Nigeria’s Route A2 runs north to south as follows: Kongolam (Niger border)–Daura–Kano–Zaria–Kaduna–Abuja–Lokoja–Auchi–Benin City–Warri.

The problem is where, in the Buhari timeline, A2 really was.  In January of that year, for instance, I had explored the chaos in the construction of a part of it in the North, the AKR, and declared that Buhari could never complete it.

Although he did not, there was evidence of ongoing work.  But not so on the Benin-Lokoja stretch (or the Benin-Warri), where the federal government appeared to be disinterested, no matter how much the people of Edo State wept or pleaded or were deprived.  Evidence of this is all over YouTube.

In July 2017, Governor Godwin Obaseki publicly lamented the condition of the highway.  In desperation two months later, members of the Edo State House of Assembly called on the federal government to revoke a construction contract because of the shortcomings of the contractor.  In December 2022, Edo Deputy  Governor Philip Shuaibu issued a fresh appeal to the federal government.

The conundrum of that segment of A2 continued in 2019 when the Ministry of Works announced, strangely, that reconstruction had reached “an appreciable level.”

“The road was initially scheduled to be completed in 2018, said Oke Owhe, the Federal Controller of Works in Edo State, Oke Owhe.  “Over 35.19 per cent has been completed, but with the work done so far, the completion will be reviewed.”

Mr. Owhe was wrong.  So was the House of Representatives which, in November 2021, ordered an investigation of the work on the road which.  It claimed it had been awarded to a consortium of contractors in 1999 with a completion date of December 2021.  That means those contracts were awarded during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency with a 22-year completion period.

My conclusion is that by the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, everyone had conveniently forgotten about the Obasanjo contracts.  Because on the website of the Ministry of Works is this document, dated April 2017, “LIST OF ON-GOING FEDERAL HIGHWAY PROJECTS.”

It demonstrates that in November and December 2012, new “Original Contracts” of N11,663,957,682.30, N11,086,276,140.36, N11,659,588,909.69, and 11,679,997,440.71 (billions) were given to four named companies.  The document further shows that the amounts paid to them, up till April 2017, ranged between N3.6 and N7.3 (billions).  As demonstrated in this story, that was before Buhari arrived but also before he ramped up spending, allegedly on roads.   You may wish to save a copy of the document  as I have.

For clarification, this is all about a 300km stretch of Route A2.  It is not about the 375km AKR part of it, which continues to gulp its own resources, and which will not be completed until 2025.

I write this not because of the amount of money that has been emptied into Benin-Lokoja, but because of the lack of official attention that the Buhari government paid in eight years.

Remember: the N200bn the House claimed it was investigating (the House seems to investigate in the mass media), was from a system put in place in 1999; neither Buhari nor Fashola knew of it.  And then there are the contracts the Jonathan government issued for the road in 2012; Buhari and Fashola did not know about those, either.

Of Buhari’s tenure, in Abuja and London, there is no evidence of any awareness of the road until January 2023, with just four months to go, when Buhari approved N75bn.

That was two months after Fashola claimed Buhari had constructed 8,352.94km nationwide.  It was also three years after he said at a press conference that“[Nigerian] roads are not as bad as they are often portrayed,” something he said he learned from traveling ”to the 36 states, 12 hours every day…”  The budget of the Ministry of Works had grown “from N18.132b in 2015 to N394b in 2018,” he announced.   Perhaps during a break from packing his bags government in mid-March 2023, Fashola told Monday Okpebholo (Senator-Elect, Edo Central) that funds had “just been released” for repairs and to complete the Benin-Auchi-Okene expressway.

How lazy or indifferent did APC prove to be between 2015 and 2023?  Some things are simply too shameful for words.