NANS Hails Tinubu and Umahi on Road Tour, But the Pictures Tell a Different Story

The National Association of Nigerian Students has begun a nationwide tour of federal road projects, and its first stop produced a familiar script. After inspecting the Kaduna-Abuja and Kaduna-Kano roads, NANS President Babatunde Akinteye declared the roads to be in good condition and commended President Bola Tinubu and Works Minister David Umahi for their investments in infrastructure. The students, he said, had eased movement and reduced transportation challenges.

The endorsement was swift. It was also predictable.

This is the same NANS that, in August, inducted Umahi as its Grand Patron. At that ceremony, the minister urged the students to support Tinubu’s second-term bid, telling them it was “time to take sides”. He also announced a presidential gift of an 18-seater bus to the NANS president. When a minister is your patron, when he donates vehicles, when he asks you to campaign for his principal, and when he flies you around the country to inspect his own projects, what exactly is an “independent” tour supposed to look like?

The Kaduna-Kano road may be fine. But NANS did not tour the Benin-Asaba highway, where truck drivers have reported spending three days on a journey that should take hours. It did not visit the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, where commuters slept in their vehicles for twelve hours this week because of repair works the government failed to plan for. It did not inspect the Abaji-Kotonkarfe-Lokoja-Okene highway, which a lawyer has sued Tinubu and Umahi over, alleging it has been abandoned.

NANS says it will tour the country and produce a report. But the report is already being written in the headlines. The same minister who is being praised by his own patron-student union is the same minister whose “roads to hell” have been documented by Vanguard. The same administration that NANS is applauding is the same administration that has initiated only two entirely new highways since 2023, by Umahi’s own admission, while the rest of the country waits for abandoned projects to be completed.

The students who commute daily on Nigeria’s roads know the truth. They know the difference between a road that has been patched for a photo opportunity and a road that is actually fixed. They know that a bus ride from Lagos to Benin should not take three days. They know that sleeping in traffic on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is not an “improved infrastructure” story. And they know that when their leaders are given gifts and flown around by the same government they are supposed to be holding accountable, the tour is not an inspection. It is a campaign stop.

NANS has every right to inspect federal projects. But it should do so without the minister’s bus in the parking lot and the minister’s donation in its bank account. Until then, its commendations will be treated for what they are: endorsements, not assessments.

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