Typical examples of waste, corruption and misplaced priority are the murky Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road on which the President had turned deaf ears to protests and the new Vice-President’s official residence built at a cost of N21bn in the time of economic hardship
The N15.6 trillion Lagos-Calabar Highway project has been criticized by the former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Obasanjo also criticized the administration of President Bola Tinubu for spending N21 billion on a new official mansion for Vice President Kashim Shettima.
He referred to this expenditure as a misplaced priority and a conduit designed to pilfer public fund. In the sixth chapter of his new book, titled “Nigeria: Past and Future,” Obasanjo revealed this information.
In this chapter, he also sketched a portrait of the personalities of chief executives at both the federal and state levels. Obasanjo celebrated his 88th birthday last week by releasing two new publications, including the book.
David Umahi, the Minister of Works, disclosed that the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, which spans 700 kilometers, will cost N4.93 billion per kilometer.
He also stated that the contract was granted on a counterpart-funding basis rather than a public-private partnership for the construction of the highway.
The pilot phase of the project, which begins in Eko Atlantic and is anticipated to end at the Lekki Deep Sea Port, has received around N1.06 trillion in funding, which is equivalent to six percent of the total project.
Many prominent Nigerians, including Atiku Abubakar, who is running for president as the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the general elections of 2023, have expressed their disagreement with the decision made by the Federal Government to give the contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction Company without conducting a competitive bidding process.
IREPORT247NEW reported The Federal Government has disbursed N15 billion out of the N18 billion allocated for the first phase of compensation to owners of demolished properties along Section One of the Lagos-Calabar Highway.
This was revealed at a stakeholders’ meeting on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway in Lagos on Sunday.
According to Bede Obioha, the Director of Federal Highways, Bridges, and Design at the Federal Ministry of Works, the total compensation amount exceeds N18 billion. He noted that the contractor has managed to disburse over N15 billion for Section 1, which covers 47.7km.
The Minister of Works, David Umahi, announced that 30km out of 70km of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway Phase 1, Section 1, will be inaugurated in May 2025. Umahi also stated that everyone on the compensation list of section 1 of the coastal road would have been paid in 10 days.
“Everything appears to be transactional, with the slogan being ‘It’s my turn to chop, ” Obasanjo remarked, evaluating Tinubu’s two years in office, adding it seemed that the game of short-changing the more than 230 million Nigerians would continue.
He said, the majority of those who have been fortunate enough to hold leadership positions in the country, such as governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners, and even local government chairmen, are ill-prepared, satanic, and self-centered, and they are all about to corruptly enrich themselves while the nation continues to wallow in abject poverty and condemnable underdevelopment.
Obasanjo stated, “How do you explain the situation of a chief executive, a governor, whose business was owing the banks billions of naira and millions of dollars before becoming a governor and within two years of becoming governor, without his company doing any business, he paid all that his businesses owed the banks.
“You are left to guess where the money came from. Having got away with that in the first term, he consigned to himself almost half of the state resources in the second term. He was a typical example of the goings-on at that level almost universally in the country with only a few exceptions.
“State resources are captured and appropriated to themselves with a pittance to staff and associates to close the mouths of those that could blow the whistle or raise alarm against them while in office and when they are out of office.
“The ones that are criminally ridiculous are the chief executives that deceive, lie and try to cover up on the realities and truth of action and inaction on contract awards, agreements, treaties, borrowings and forward sales of national assets. Such chief executives are unfit for the job they find themselves in.
“Typical examples of waste, corruption and misplaced priority are the murky Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road on which the President had turned deaf ears to protests and the new Vice-President’s official residence built at a cost of N21bn in the time of economic hardship to showcase the administration hitting the ground running and to show the importance of the office of the Vice-President. What small minds!
“If the West, from where the liberal democracy started should complain about it not working well for them, we should be wise enough at this stage to interrogate, carry out introspection, internal analysis and realise that Western liberal democracy is not working for us and is not delivering apart from the shortcomings of the operators.”