Comrade Joseph Evah, an activist and coordinator of the Ijaw Monitoring Group has used this opportunity to urge the President Bola Tinubu to involve more contractors in the Lagos-Calabar superhighway project to decentralize it.
Evah further suggested that the Calabar section of the project should be awarded to other contracting companies to increase the rate of work done.
The Lagos-Calabar coastal highway project initially planned as 700 km long-running through 9 states was awarded to Hitech Construction Company Limited on an EPC+F basis where Hitech incurred most of the risk component while the federal government has to provide funding on the project counterpart basis.
The federal government launched the construction in March 2024 with the early stage of the project, which covers 47. 47 kilometres from Lagos.
The project has attracted criticism from the federal government’s major opponents, including the PDP presidential candidate in the previous election, Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party’s presidential candidate Peter Obi.
Evah explained that the pace of work on the highway must be speeded up, and more contractors must be invited to the project.
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He urged Tinubu to learn from the Babangida regime and how it engaged many contractors to embark on the construction of the Third Mainland bridge in the 1990s.
“That area is swampy, apart from the danger of using a single contractor, and any other fear. We are not dealing with rocky ground or whatever; we are talking of sand-filling and all that. If Babangida, who was a military ruler, decided to adopt that, just within Lagos, it would be difficult for one contractor to move from one end straight to the other. He did it in 1991. He decided to give the contract to two or three contractors.
“If that is not done, we will not be happy with the president, and we are going to confront the situation. We will say, ’there is a hidden agenda in the project.’ If not, we expect contractors from the Calabar side to move down to Lagos while the Lagos axis will move to Calabar, and they will meet in the middle. That’s how to show we have been carried along,” Evah said.
