Friday, January 17, 2025 - David Umahi, the Minister of Works, has confirmed that funding for the Lagos-Calabar coastal road project was included in the 2025 appropriation bill. This comes after reports emerged that the project was not listed in the 2025 budget, which was presented by President Bola Tinubu to the National Assembly in December 2024. In January 2025, BudgIT, a civic-tech organization advocating for transparency, pointed out that the funding for the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway was missing from the appropriation bill, sparking mixed reactions on social media. Many questioned the rationale behind the federal government demolishing properties for the project without allocating the necessary funds.
Speaking on Thursday, January 16, during the inauguration of the
rehabilitation of the Abuja to Kaduna road, Umahi clarified that the coastal
project was mistakenly written in the budget as the "Lagos-Port
Harcourt" highway. The minister explained that his ministry was working
with the National Assembly to correct the error. “I think there was a little
error. What you have in the budget is Lagos-Port Harcourt coastal highway,”
Umahi said. “It is supposed to be the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway. We are
interfacing with the committee chairman to correct it. It is a mistake.”
Further checks revealed that N100,000,000 was allocated under a line
item labeled "Lagos-Port Harcourt coastal highway," with the status
listed as "ongoing." In February 2024, the federal executive council
approved the construction of the Lagos-Port Harcourt-Calabar highway for Hitech
Construction Africa, a company owned by Gilbert Chagoury. The federal
government began construction of the highway at the Lagos axis in March 2024,
and in May 2024, President Tinubu flagged off the 700-kilometer Lagos-Calabar coastal
highway.
Umahi had previously stated that the coastal project would cost N4
billion per kilometer and emphasized that the project was not intended as a
public-private partnership (PPP) but rather an engineering procurement and
construction (EPC+) structure, meaning the federal government would be
responsible for providing counterpart funding. The destruction of several
multi-million-naira properties at the Lagos axis to begin the project has
raised concerns and sparked controversy.
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