When Nigeria’s Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi arrived at Singapore’s Changi Airport in 2017, a pleasant surprise awaited him.
In his own words, “…I didn’t find one person. As you walk in, technology takes over.”
He was describing the just-opened Terminal 4. But he should not have been so surprised, for that was how it was designed.
Yet the marvel Amaechi described was but a foretaste of the far more ambitious Terminal 5, an experience-just a few years from now-in which automation will manage aircraft traffic and movement at the airport.
Passengers? They will also be able to disembark, go through automated formalities, pick up their luggage which would already have been sorted out by machines and delivered to carousels, and arrive at public transportation with almost no human interaction.
Why? Because the airport aims at annual passenger traffic of about 50 million, smoothly managed. They want you to be so happy you will return.
Enter then, China’s Daxing International Airport, Beijing’s second, which opened last year and now boasts the world’s largest airport terminal. Built on 18 square miles, Daxing aims at processing an imperious 100 million by 2040, deploying similarly futuristic automation as Changi.
And yet, that humongous airport was built in just four years.
To be fair to Mr. Amaechi, when he spoke about his Singapore experience, he was admonishing his own APC government, calling for an end to the blaming of its predecessor and offering Changi as an example.
Sadly, as I described in the first part of this essay, his Lagos-Ibadan rail provides the best example of a government with deepening incapacity to deliver. It is a government in pretend mode, exemplified by a two-year project that has fallen into interminable construction.
Right alongside it: the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, also in endless construction; the current phase of which began in 2009. Almost proof-positive that this ailment is three-dimensional; 2009 was also when the Lagos Blue Line began construction. In 2015, the state government said it would be completed in 2016; in 2019, it proudly announced that testing would begin in December…2020!
The reality is that in Nigeria, the concept of governance is in extremely bad health.
Think about it; at the end of last week, Governor Nasir El-Rufai announced that the federal government had in the past three years spent N1.7 trillion (nearly $5bn) on electricity.
By contrast, the Olusegun Obasanjo government spent about $16bn, a sum so scandalous President Muhammadu Buhari swears (wink!) daily he will probe.
But Obasanjo’s $16bn was spread over eight years presumably in generation, distribution and transmission.
Buhari’s three-year, $5bn feast, on the other hand, is only in transmission, as generation and distribution were sold into captivity by the Jonathan government.
Similarly, the federal government announced last week that a $321m tranche of Abacha loot will soon be repatriated to Nigeria.
Apparently because Buhari hates to pronounce “Abacha loot”, it appears the US may have insisted on a certain terminology, because the Attorney-General Abubakar Malami specifically told journalists: “The $321m expected to be repatriated is attached to Abacha and it is named Abacha loot.”
Of greater importance, he said the money will be spent on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Abuja-Kano road and the Second Niger Bridge (SNB).
Foreigners such as the Swiss and the Americans who try to compel development or transparency in Nigeria are owed far more sympathy than gratitude. They are solving the wrong problem.
These three projects-unlike thousands of others in Nigeria-need leadership, not more money.
Take one example, the SNB. Whatever one may say of Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, he pledged to go on exile if he failed to build it by the end of his term in 2015. But he undertook his groundbreaking only in March 2014, saying the project would be delivered in 2018.
The project was to cost his government N117bn, but speedy completion was assured, Jonathan said, because his government was contributing N30 billion, which was 25% of the cost. Contractor Julius Berger took the job.
But Jonathan ran out of relevance and out of time. Enter Buhari.
In January 2017, his government announced that a contract for “preliminary works” had been awarded to JB which was very strange, as JB had been constructing the bridge for three years.
In February, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Agency (NSIA) announced it would invest $760 million in SNB under a PPP arrangement.
In May 2018, Buhari raised the stakes, establishing a Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF), to be managed by the same NSIA, to invest in critical national infrastructure.
The SNB, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, and the Abuja-Kano Road were listed, and the National Economic Council immediately authorized seed funding of $650 million dollars to the NSIA for the PIDF.
In November, the government awarded a N206bn contract to JB for the “main work” on the SNB, Minister Babatunde Fashola said, specifying it would be completed in 36 months and funded by the PIDF.
Curiously, on July 4, five months earlier, the government had approved another contract-for the exact same N206 billion and to the same company-for related work.
“Today, FEC has approved the award of the link road; the bridge itself is just 1.95 kilometres, but the link road is 11.9km and this contract was awarded to Julius Berger for the sum of N206 billion,” said Information Minister Lai Mohammed.
Into that cauldron is where Nigeria claims it will empty what is sure to be most of the forthcoming $321bn Abacha loot. ’Nigerias record with repatriated loot yields no hope that this money will not disappear just like about $3bn already has.It ought to have been given to the NSIA, where it would be safer.
In Nigeria, corruption continues to frustrate progress, and infrastructure development provides the best theatre for this problem, particularly with the Buhari government.The Chinese city of Wuhan, confronting the coronavirus crisis, built hospitals with thousands of beds in six days; we would need at least six years just to complete the walls. We would then announce contracts for generators.
Bill Gates is developing a new toilet. In India, they are reinventing the air-conditioner. In Nigeria, we have no time for questions that would benefit the public, or for intellectuals. We use words to liberate100 million people from poverty.
Governor El-Rufai describes the entire (electricity) sector as “broken,” and he is right.
But it is broken because our very instinct for governance and prosecuting the common good is broken. We are 150 million nations, each one fighting for itself but pretending to be otherwise.
Unless we heal that, a scorched-earth outrage may one day burn it out of us.
[This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials].
• @SonalaOlumhense
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