The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway was originally conceived to connect Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom, and Cross Rivers States. In other words, the 700-kilometre road, whose contract was awarded at $11 billion and remains the biggest infrastructure project by President Bola Tinubu administration, was meant to connect two of the country’s three geopolitical zones in southern Nigeria. Why was the Southeast left out? No explanation was given for this fundamental political and economic error.
But this awful deficiency has now been rectified. On 16 April 2025, President Tinubu flagged off the 118kilometre road extension from Calabar, the Cross River State capital, to Afikpo in Ebonyi State, connecting the Southeast.
The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway also now includes Benue and Nasarawa states and the Abuja Federal Capital Territory, all in Nigeria’s North Central geopolitical zone. Nigerians may have quibbled with the prioritization of the road, the cost, the manner of the award, and the choice of the contractor, but the project, scheduled for completion in 2031, is now a fait accomplice.
It is now more inclusive, bringing down the country’s political temperature and fostering a greater sense of national participation and project ownership.
While the original vision of the road may not be his, its expansion to make it more inclusive appears to have the input of the Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, which Tinubu embraced enthusiastically in furtherance of national cohesion and rapid progress. The minister seems to appreciate the burden of history on his shoulders. He is the first person from the Southeast to be appointed the Minister of Works and comes from Ebonyi, the most neglected state in the Southeast. Therefore, he recognizes the value of social justice.
He was appointed purely on merit. Elected into the Senate in 2023, Umahi is a civil engineer driven by what psychologists call intrinsic motivation, as opposed to extrinsic motivation. He has a passion for both engineering and public service.
Though a politician who has led the Southeast Governors Forum, Umahi is generally considered a technocrat. He has caused the Federal Ministry of Works to make key changes in, among other areas, road design and construction plus aesthestics. Key roads are now built on a cement base. The nation has seen the expertise and passion he has brought in addressing bridges and roads in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, guiding contractors and Ministry of Works engineers on the path of professionalism and modernity, enabling the citizens to have full value for their money.
The appointment of accomplished professionals as leaders of organizations where they have core competencies has been a subject of interest to leadership scholars around the globe for decades. While there is a general agreement by both researchers and practitioners that individuals should be sent to places where they have a competitive edge, sometimes non-experts are appointed to head organizations where they have little or no expertise; they sometimes surprise everyone with their brilliant performance.
For instance, when IBM, the American technology icon, ran into rough weather and was about to go into receivership in 1992, Louis Gerstner, a person with almost no knowledge of technology, was hired as its CEO; he did a marvellous job! Still, IBM has since then been hiring only technology experts as CEOs. Perhaps, borrowing a leaf from the IBM of the early 1990s, Volvo, the Swedish motor company, chose Jim Rowan, an expert in electronics sales, as its chief executive in 2022, but by March of 2025 the firm was doing so awfully that it had to remove Rowan and bring back its former CEO, 75 year-old Hankan Samuelsson, to run the multinational for two years while it searches for a substantive CEO. In other words, Rowan was a square peg in a round hole while Samelsson is a square peg in a square hole. Having a professional fit is critical to organizational performance.
As the Ebonyi State chief executive from 2015 to 2023, Umahi was the first governor in Nigeria to build a large road network of some 1,500 kilometres with a cement base, even though Ebonyi has always received about the lowest allocation from the federation account monthly. He left a litany of engineering and aesthetic marvels at competitive costs in Ebonyi, stretching from the state airport to the international conference centre to international markets to hotels to educational institutions, to say nothing about bridges and flyovers he personally supervised. Tinubu was impressed when he visited Ebonyi to campaign for the president in 2023 and stated so publicly. Perhaps at this point, he resolved to appoint him the Minister of Works if he won the presidential vote.
Several roads are being reconstructed or rehabilitated across the country’s six geopolitical zones, including the Southeast, which has for decades been complaining of neglect in the provision of critical infrastructure, of course, with justification. Many of the new roads have a cement base. This means that they will last much longer than conventional roads with a concrete base, though the upfront costs of the cement roads are higher.
While it is true that the Federal Government is working on roads in each of the five states in the Southeast to make up for years of neglect, which Nigerians call marginalization, there is still a lot of work to be done in the zone to bring it up to scratch. For instance, the Okija-Ihiala-Uli-Egbu-Oguta Road connecting Anambra, Imo, and Rivers states has been abandoned since construction in 1982, for a whole 43 years! It is easily the worst federal road in the entire country. Some sections of the road are just impassable, especially during the rainy season, except to a person driving a military tank. Many people in the Ihiala section of the road do not go to school, work, or church on any day it rains.
The road, which leads to the most crude oil-prolific area in the Rivers State, is acadamized, that is, it was constructed with a technology that had become antiquated even by 1982. The road desperately needs modernization. A road that connects three oil-producing states deserves a cement base so that it can last.
The most important lesson from the expanded Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, which is now more inclusive and makes for greater national cohesion and progress, is the need to have accomplished professionals lead organizations in both the private and public sectors where they have core competencies. That’s why management scholars speak of person-organization fit. Still, it has to be stressed that technical or job knowledge is not enough. Public and private sector leaders must have a passion for their work and cherish values like integrity and commitment to the common good. The nation needs more Dave Umahis.
Adinuba was the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Anambra State.
