When I first heard Minister of Works David Umahi say that the Lagos-Calabar Highway would be completed by January 2026, I spilt my coffee.
“I assure you that by January next year, God willing, we will have this road completed,” he was quoted as saying during an inspection tour on Wednesday
I lost my coffee because I know that the Bola Tinubu administration has neither the intention nor the heart to commence and complete 200 kilometres of the project highway by 2027, let alone the entire project one year earlier.
It is simply not in the DNA of the APC administrations. Keep in mind the APC manifesto, which the party itself undermined.
That is what happens when you pretend to renew hope when the very hope being renewed is the one that you violated by yourself.
And so, hours later, Umahi was back on the microphone: “Some of you reported that I said the [Highway] was 70 per cent done and will be finished by January 2026 [but] that is not what I said. We were dealing with Section One. And then, [I] said, as at today, that Section One, which is 47.47km, has been 70 per cent completed,” he said.
Do you get it? Less than 50km—or 7 per cent–of the project is expected to be completed by January 2026.
The truth is rather elementary: APC is defrauding Nigeria. It has been so since it arrived in May 2015.
It will not complete this highway or any other major one, just as it will not honour any significant electoral promise.
The APC game is one only of possessing power. Get it, spend it.
As far back as 2001, The Economist called the game, “Bill, borrow and embezzle.”
All APC has done is bait Nigerians of both the vulnerable and greedy varieties, snatch political power and embezzle.
Meaning: if you are paying attention to their activities, as opposed to what they are proclaiming or promising, you already know that the Tinubu administration will never complete any significant infrastructure, let alone lead by example.
Of course, it will buy a jet for the president. Renovate the newly-renovated State House. Build and renovate other mansions and annexes for him. Procure a yacht and pay the ‘First Daughter’s personal hotel bills.
Renovate the just-built State House Medical Centre. Give him N10bn for solar panels allegedly to avoid an annual N47bn State House power bills.
It will relentlessly flaunt power while flouting the rule of law on which our constitutional order is based, and the decency and dignity of our people.
Just a few weeks ago, for instance, former President Muhammadu Buhari was trying to prolong the ruse of his being a modest man, telling Nigerians that he now sustains himself on rental income from his Kaduna property.
He told an APC meeting, “After my eight years as a civil president, I have only three houses: one in Daura and two in Kaduna. I have given one out for renting, where I get money for feeding.”
I have consistently challenged this self-serving account, drawing attention to a mansion in Abuja that a newspaper reported in June 2015 that he owned. Buhari has never denied it.
Six weeks later, in July 2015, presidential spokesman Garba Shehu, offering some details from Buhari’s first official assets declaration, appeared to confirm the Abuja property when he said his principal had “two homes in Kaduna, one each in Kano, Daura (Katsina State) and in Abuja.”
As president, Buhari spent a lot of luxury time in London, at the federal government’s expense. Somehow, two years after his atrocious presidency, he curiously appears able to maintain the same lifestyle. Last week, he was once again reported to be enjoying its comfort.
That is despite his claim he survives only on a Kaduna rental income and his telling King Charles in November 2022 that he owns no home in the UK.
But this is the APC nightmare. If anyone has proof of its commitment to the Nigerian people, such as anything in the party manifesto that I have cited, or evidence of the government’s fidelity to its August 2023 announcement to lift 133 million Nigerians out of poverty, please let me help you celebrate it.
Furthermore, did you miss the story that, according to the Federal Road Safety Corps, at least 73 persons were killed in the first three months of 2025 on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, and 393 others injured.
Or the ICPC reporting that of the N100 billion given to the tertiary institutions for student loans, over 71.2bn was diverted?
But clearly at the top of the list of the concerns of Nigerians is the nationwide insecurity that is swallowing Nigeria. Only last Sunday, I called for a “comprehensive, professional, multi-dimensional field offensive” to tackle the menace.
While the overseers of APC wallow in power at home and abroad, Nigeria has been overrun by an assortment of militia, crime cartels, kidnappers and non-Nigerian Fulani operatives.
It seems like only yesterday that the musician Tosin Alao told his abduction story on the Amina Atahiru Show, detailing what his Fulani abductors told them about their business. Here it is as reported in the Vanguard on April 30, 2022.
Such criminals were left untouched throughout the Buhari presidency. The truth is that his administration hid under the war against Boko Haram to nurture a Fulani ascendancy, with many of its adherents now all over Nigeria’s villages and forests and farms. As far back as June 2016, I had rejected the suggestion that cattle-herders had become adept at reading GPS maps or AK-47 manuals.
But now, many of our children cannot go to school, nor can their parents go to farms and businesses. Our leaders or their families hide in Abuja, London or Paris, or the Middle East.
I am glad to see some northern governors waking up. In a communique during the week, the Northeast Governors Forum called for “a multidimensional approach of not only the kinetic strategy but also addressing the root causes, such as youth employment through vocational and technical education, improved road networks, improved education and reducing poverty.”
But it is premature for them to be talking about “opening up the subregion to investment opportunities.”
They must start now, and from the beginning, which is to invest intensively and extensively in education, with contiguous states mapping out areas of cooperation, and putting pressure on the federal authorities. That must start now.
The federal government is sadly still complacent. They talk about insecurity but have no plan. Last week, for instance, Nigeria sent its Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle to meet with the United States Africa Command’s visiting Major General Garrick Harmon, to call for increased US support for Nigeria’s “evolving security challenges.”
There is a tool for every job. While in Nigeria standards are low we are desperately scrubbing out character, the US knows Mr. Matawalle by his record. They may humour him, but they will not do business with him, or with Nigeria through people like him.
The point is that President Tinubu, perhaps because he wants eight years, is not combating Nigeria’s insecurity.
This mess belongs to him, not Buhari, not Nasir el-Rufai, and not Nuhu Ribadu.
By Sonala Olumhense