The Minister of Works, David Umahi, has admitted that the 750-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, one of President Bola Tinubu’s flagship infrastructure projects, has no single comprehensive engineering design more than two years after construction started in March 2024. The minister said the project is being designed and costed in separate sections rather than under one master design, a disclosure that raises serious questions about how the government approved and awarded a multi-trillion-naira contract without a complete blueprint.
Umahi made the admission during a one-hour-thirty-minute interview on Arise Television monitored by Punch. Asked directly whether there was an engineering design covering the entire highway, he replied: “There is no one single design that the 750 kilometres of Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway is holding. There’s no one single design”. He said the highway had been conceived as far back as 1955 and the concept was gazetted in 2006, but he maintained that he had not found a complete engineering design, subsoil investigation or other detailed technical documents covering the entire route in the ministry’s archives.
The minister said engineering designs are developed for individual sections after environmental assessments and soil investigations establish the route, terrain and technical requirements. He said the Federal Executive Council-approved procurement arrangement required the project to be procured section by section, adding that the approach made it inappropriate to multiply an estimated average cost by the entire 750km. “Who fixed this N15tn that people are just brandishing everywhere? Who fixed it? And let me also clarify that nobody has the right to do an average cost and multiply by 750,” he said.
The absence of a single design and a comprehensive project cost raises questions about how the government intends to establish the total financial commitment, assess the highway’s overall value and communicate its completion cost to Nigerians. The project was awarded to Hitech Construction Company through direct procurement, without public advertisement or open competitive bidding. Umahi defended the award, saying the procurement method was permitted under Nigerian law because of the specialised engineering expertise required to construct a highway along the Atlantic coastline. He said the government relied on Hitech’s work on Eko Atlantic to justify its selection, and that the Bureau of Public Procurement reviewed the proposal and advised that the highway should be procured in sections before the Federal Executive Council gave approval.
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But approval of a procurement method does not establish whether the government had completed the engineering design for the entire highway, determined its final cost or adequately assessed the technical and financial implications of delivering the project across different coastal environments. For a highway of this scale, a comprehensive design would ordinarily provide the engineering basis for determining the alignment, bridge and drainage requirements, soil conditions, coastal protection measures, environmental safeguards, construction specifications and estimated costs. Where a project is divided into sections, the government would also need to demonstrate how the individual designs fit into a coordinated master plan for the entire corridor.
The disclosure comes amid persistent questions over the project’s overall cost, construction process, environmental approvals and the government’s capacity to complete the highway. Umahi said differences in road configuration and project specifications must be considered before comparing costs, citing a 47km section of the highway and a 47.47km coastal road in Benin Republic which he said cost N1.06 trillion. He put the adjusted cost at approximately $5.5 million per kilometre for a standard two-lane carriageway, based on an exchange rate of N1,330 to the dollar. On environmental approvals, he confirmed that construction began after the ministry obtained a provisional Environmental and Social Impact Assessment certificate, and that environmental assessments were being handled section by section rather than through a single assessment covering the entire 750km route.
The minister also addressed the controversy over the project’s alignment, insisting that the 750-kilometre route remains intact and cannot be altered, even as surveyors and designers continue work on outstanding portions through Edo, Delta, Bayelsa and Rivers states. Critics have questioned whether portions of the original coastal alignment have been abandoned in favour of the existing East-West Road, a claim the government has denied.
The People’s Democratic Party has demanded a probe into the project, accusing the Tinubu government of secrecy over the cost and procurement of the highway. For a government that has presented the coastal highway as the crown jewel of its infrastructure agenda, the admission that there is no single design, no comprehensive cost estimate and no competitive bidding process is a damning indictment of how public funds are being managed. Nigerians are being asked to trust a project that the government itself cannot fully describe, cost or justify. And the man in charge of building it has just confirmed that the blueprint does not exist.
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