Fast Company
Last month, Nigeria started work on the 700-kilometer Calabar-Lagos coastal highway project, an undertaking that quickly saw the demolition of 70% of a $200 million beach resort, the dissolution of businesses, and the loss of jobs. According to CNN, Paul Onwuanibe, the owner of the razed resort, didn’t get any advance notice about the demolition until late March when he was told he had seven days to evacuate the property. It didn’t take long after the notice period for the area to become rubble.
The Calabar-Lagos highway is Nigeria’s biggest road project ever, aiming to connect the country’s six geopolitical regions through seven states across more than 435 miles. It’s modeled after roads like California’s Pacific Coast Highway and is estimated to cost between 14 trillion and 15.6 trillion Nigerian nairas ($11 billion to $12.5 billion) over its eight years of construction. But it’s already mired in a slew of controversies.
An unlawful awarding process
A 2007 Public Procurement Act requires all major federal projects to be open to a competitive and publicized bidding process. However, the awarding process for the Calabar-Lagos project bypassed this law. The ministry of works gave the project to Hitech Construction Co., a foreign-owned firm that has the president’s son, Seyi Tinubu, on its board.
Environmental and infrastructure experts say that this fast-tracked awarding process (which Nigeria’s House of Representatives is investigating) as well as potential environmental risks and extravagant costs could ultimately mean ruin for the project, even if it’s completed.
Enormous costs
Omogbai Martins, an engineering project manager who has overseen telecom infrastructure projects and data center constructions, believes that the money being allocated for the Calabar-Lagos highway would be better spent elsewhere, especially given the country’s economic state and soaring inflation. “Why is the government focusing on big, expensive projects when the country is in an economic ruin?” he asks.
He’s not alone. “There are many abandoned roads connecting key industrial regions that could have been completed; instead they’re throwing away so much money for this one. It doesn’t make sense,” says Michael Terungwa, an environmental management lead with the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation. He believes the money would be better spent fixing several of the country’s failing roads.
Terungwa has been investigating the source of the project’s funding, and says the government hasn’t provided any clarity on where it’s coming from. However, the recent news that the government would allocate 20 trillion Nigerian nairas ($16 billion) of worker pension funds to infrastructure projects clarified things for him. “When I heard the announcement, I realized that this is where they planned to get funding for the coastal project, at the expense of pensioners’ well-being.” The ministries of works and finance did not respond to requests for comment.
Biodiversity loss
Alongside cost and transparency concerns, some also worry about the project’s environmental costs. It will be “prone to heavy biodiversity loss, the death of endangered species, and heavy flooding in the foreseeable future,” according to Uzoma Okoroafor, an environmental and social safeguards consultant with the African Development Group. He notes that the project lacks an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) report to prove otherwise. This assessment, required by a 1992 law, is critical for taking on a project as large and as sensitive as this one—especially as the coastal highways it’s modeled after have been in decline for years due to flooding and erosion.
