Campaigning in Uyo in March 2011, Nigeria’s then leader, Goodluck Jonathan, assured the country he would, if elected, undertake new road and rail infrastructure from Lagos to Calabar.
It was a massive new thinking that had its roots in the Vision 20:2020 economic dream of about 10 years earlier under President Olusegun Obasanjo. That government proposed a 25-year railway development plan that, among others, would connect Nigeria’s major cities by standard gauge rail.
It was therefore significant that in November 2014, Nigeria signed an $11.97 billion contract with the China Railway Construction Corp. Ltd (CRCC) for a coastal rail line from Lagos to Calabar.
The specifications were fascinating:1,402 kilometres of rail; trains running at 120km per hour, connecting 22 station lines and 10 States; 30,000 direct jobs when the line was operational, and about 200,000 during construction. China’s state media described the deal as that country’s single largest overseas contract.
The construction would at one end hook into the Lagos-Kano line and at the other the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri, opening several possibilities. It would, for the first time, provide glimpses of Nigeria’s potential to move people and goods by something safer and more reliable than her ramshackle roads. This had the extra element that it would be connecting the nation’s ports to the hinterland.
But the trouble with Nigerian development has never been projects or promises, but insincerity of the promise-makers. In other words, political will.
Remember: Mr. Jonathan had also promised the Second Niger Bridge (SNB), a carrot he first dangled before the Igbos in 2007 when he ran for the vice-presidency.
Deploying the same weapon on his own in 2011, Jonathan won the Igbo vote, and returned to Onitsha in August 2012 to restate himself. So certain was he, as he spoke at a Town Hall meeting, that he swore to go on exile if he didn’t complete the SNB before the end of his term in 2015.
He told the mammoth crowd: “When the first bridge was built, it was during the presidency of Nnamdi Azikiwe. The Second Niger Bridge will be built under the presidency of Azikiwe Jonathan.”
In March 2014-one year before the next presidential election-he finally broke ground on the project. The event was a confession, as he unveiled his “2015-or exile” ruse as deliverable only in 2018.
He was bumped out of office at the next election, although I am not sure any Igbo, anywhere, knows his exile address. Nonetheless, you could say he was better than one Olusegun Obasanjo, whose government lied in May 2007 it was commencing a N58.6bn contract for the bridge.
The point is that we have, as a people, allowed ourselves to be cornered into an alternate reality where projects are planned and budgeted but never completed. Each budget is simply another campaign lie cobbled together by politicians and civil servants, and nobody questions them.
Think about it: with just days of election campaign days left last week, President Muhammadu Buhari pledged to probe Obasanjo over the $16 billion he spent on electricity.
“If you give us the next four years I assure you, you won’t regret it,’’ Buhari told hapless voters.
And his selling point? “You know there was no power under the previous administrations, and a previous government admitted without anybody asking them, that they spent $16 billion for power…Those people who say they spent 16 billion dollars on power, they will account for it.”
It was worse than Jonathan budgeting a 2018 currency he could not guarantee. Buhari had received four guaranteed years during which he never asked Obasanjo to tell his $16bn electricity tale to a probe panel.
But Obasanjo was Buhari’s key supporter in 2015 and was therefore ineligible for the accountability test. In February 2019 on the “missing” $16bn, Buhari-like Jonathan on the SNB in March 2015-is hoping to borrow time, like easy billions from the Chinese EXIM bank, to make the very looters he has protected for four years fall to their knees.
This time, Atiku Abubakar is Obasanjo’s friend who, under our prevailing system, would not permit any questions to be asked of Obasanjo, either.
And if Buhari wins, it is evident that despite his claims he has already surrendered any credibility and is certain to be outfoxed and outgunned by time and cleverer manipulators. In any case, he would be chasing only those who have become enemies of self rather than country.
I never believed it was possible, or necessary, to chase individuals, either. In August 2015, I urged Buhari to probe projects, not persons; and in February 2016, argued he did not need more than four years in office to achieve success.
But to demonstrate the depth of our imprisonment, let us return to the rail track. The first thing to happen to that Lagos-Calabar coastal rail following the enthronement Buhari was its de-legitimization, as his government did not even represent it in the 2016 budget.
Following the embarrassing international gasp of disbelief that followed, the project soon returned to some government acknowledgement, and following renegotiations in which the government saved about $800m, a new agreement was signed in July 2016.
Critically, the project would also be delivered in two years: in 2018, for which purpose the four key Ministries of Finance, Works and Housing, National Planning and Justice were enlisted. “My expectation is that the project can be completed in two years since funding won’t be a problem,’’ Amaechi said at the ceremony.
Signing the agreement on behalf of his company, CCECC President Cao Baogang, said: “We will execute this project with quality…and we hope to deliver in two years as expected by the Minister.”
The hopes for the project were further boosted in June 2017 when Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking during an official visit to Calabar, affirmed that the project was on course, stating that Buhari had personally “re-negotiated the China-Exim loan for the Lagos-Calabar rail.”
But as with virtually every Nigerian public project, the coastal rail was not delivered in 2018, and there is no sign it is being constructed. The SNB will now be delivered no earlier than 2022. And the Buhari outfit, which in 2015 swore to provide 12 million jobs but has inflicted a loss of tens of millions of jobs, will now create 1.5 million by 2025.
The question is why project delivery in Nigeria is optional and the people do not scream in the streets. Of greater immediacy, why does the press keep quiet? Why does the press, which loudly and lavishly broadcasts these promises, refuse to monitor them?
When that happens, the lying politician triumphs, but the most exposed and endangered is the press. You can’t celebrate a man hawking dangerous drugs and look the other way when children are poisoned.
Right there is the real fake news. A complicit press is far more dangerous to a democracy than generations of lying, thieving politicians.
• @SonalaOlumhense
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