THE ROAD THAT KEEPS MOVING: Tinubu, Chagoury And The $13 Billion Highway Nigeria Can No Longer Describe

THE COASTAL HIGHWAY NO LONGER FOLLOWS THE COAST. THE TEN-LANE ROAD IS NOW SIX LANES. THE ROUTE IS DECIDED BY PRESIDENTIAL TELEPHONE CALL. AND THE CONTRACT WAS NEVER PUT OUT TO TENDER. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE THE MONEY IS.

For months I have warned Nigerians about the financial relationship between Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his longtime Lebanese associate, Gilbert Chagoury. I have questioned the contracts. I have questioned the absence of competitive bidding. I have questioned why a man with a documented money-laundering conviction connected to the Abacha regime sits at the centre of the most expensive infrastructure project in Nigeria’s history.

Today the government has answered me, though not in the way it intended.

On 12 October 2026, the Minister of Works, David Umahi, confirmed that the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway will no longer be built as a new coastal road beyond Ondo. It will instead be routed onto the existing East–West Road. The terrain, he now tells us, contained pits more than 100 metres deep. The new alignment, he says, will avoid excessive construction costs.

Excessive costs. On a project the government itself priced at $13 billion. Discovered after the contract was signed, after the financing was raised, after communities were demolished and after construction began.

A coastal highway that does not follow the coast is not a coastal highway. It is a different project wearing the same name, the same contractor and the same price tag.

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME THE ROAD HAS MOVED

Nigerians are being asked to treat this as a one-off engineering adjustment. It is nothing of the kind. It is the fourth fundamental change to a project that was sold to the public as fully designed and fully costed.

The road was cut from ten lanes to six. Umahi announced this himself, promising a “lower cost.” Nigerians have never been shown the revised contract sum. A road reduced by forty per cent of its width ought to be reduced in price. Where is the new figure?

The road was rerouted inside Lagos. After MTN complained about its subsea cable, Umahi admitted the government abandoned not only the new alignment but the gazetted alignment too, and invented a third path, rejoining at kilometre 25. A gazetted route is a legal instrument. Who amended it, and under what authority?

The road was extended to Edo by telephone. In October 2025, Umahi stood in Benin City and told the Governor that Edo was never part of the original alignment, that the president called him and ordered its inclusion, and that “the president has given you 100km.” A hundred kilometres of national highway, worth billions, allocated by a phone call and announced at a gala night. That is not engineering. That is patronage.

And now the road is leaving the coast altogether.

Four changes. One contractor. One beneficiary. And not one revised contract, revised cost or revised feasibility study published to the people paying for it.

THE FIGURES THE GOVERNMENT WOULD PREFER YOU NOT TO ADD UP

FIRST: THERE WAS NO TENDER.

Umahi admitted in 2024 that Hitech Construction did not participate in any open competitive bidding. He justified this on the grounds of the company’s specialised experience. In plain language: a company owned by the president’s close associate received the largest road contract in Nigerian history through a negotiated award, with no rival bidder, no price competition and no independent benchmark.

Bloomberg reported in May 2024 that the overall project was estimated at $13 billion, and described Chagoury as Tinubu’s confidante.

SECOND: THE FIRST 47 KILOMETRES COST MORE THAN A TRILLION NAIRA.

The Bureau of Public Procurement reviewed a contract price of ₦1,067,887,381,148.61 for the first 47.474 kilometres. That is approximately ₦22.5 billion per kilometre, for a road that runs across flat Lagos sand. Hitech’s original proposal was ₦1.102 trillion before a reduction of ₦33.88 billion, which the government presented as prudence. A three per cent trim on a price nobody competed against is not prudence. It is theatre.

THIRD: THE DEBT IS ALREADY SIGNED.

On 9 July 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance announced a $747 million syndicated loan for those first 47 kilometres, coordinated by Deutsche Bank, with First Abu Dhabi Bank, Afreximbank, the Abu Dhabi Exports Office, the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development, Nexent Bank and Zenith Bank. The Ministry named Hitech as the contractor under an engineering, procurement, construction and financing arrangement.

Understand what this means. A foreign contractor arranged the financing for its own contract, and Nigeria now owes international lenders for a project whose scope, width and route the government has changed four times since. The lenders will be repaid in full. The only party whose entitlement has shrunk is the Nigerian public.

How much of the $747 million has been drawn? At what interest rate? Against what collateral? With what sovereign guarantee? The Ministry has published a press release. It has not published the facility agreement.

FOURTH: THE ENGINEERING EXCUSE DOES NOT SURVIVE CONTACT WITH THE CALENDAR.

Umahi says the coastal terrain holds pits over 100 metres deep. Either the government knew this before it signed a $13 billion commitment, in which case it misled the public about the viability of the coastal route. Or it did not know, in which case it signed a $13 billion commitment without a geotechnical survey of the ground it intended to build on.

There is no third possibility. Both are disqualifying.

Where are the feasibility studies? Where are the geotechnical reports? Who certified the original alignment as buildable? What has the redesign cost, and who was paid to do it? And the question that matters most: if Hitech was contracted to build a coastal road and is now rehabilitating an existing inland one, why is the contract value not falling?

THE MAN AT THE CENTRE OF IT

Gilbert Chagoury was convicted in Switzerland in 2000 in connection with laundering money for the Abacha regime. He paid a fine and agreed to return approximately $66 million to Nigeria. The conviction was later expunged, but the facts that produced it were never in dispute. In 2021 he paid $1.8 million to resolve a United States investigation into illegal foreign campaign contributions.

These are matters of public record.

A past conviction does not prove a present crime. But a man who once agreed to return $66 million taken from Nigeria is now the recipient of a contract worth two hundred times that sum, awarded by his close friend the president, without a tender, financed by foreign debt, on a road whose route and dimensions keep changing in ways the public cannot audit.

If this arrangement is honest, it is the most carelessly structured honest arrangement in the history of Nigerian procurement.

UMAHI HAS ALREADY GIVEN HIS ANSWER. IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Standing in Ilaje last month, the Minister insisted the realignment was “not influenced by private interests” but by engineering realities. I note that he felt the need to say it. I also note that he offered no document to support it.

A minister’s word is not an audit. A television interview is not a bill of quantities. And “trust me” is not a procurement procedure.

THE COMMUNITIES THAT WERE PROMISED A COAST

This highway was sold to the people of Ondo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom as a coastal transformation: ports, tourism, markets, jobs. Properties were demolished on that promise. Compensation, by the government’s own account, has run into billions of naira. The people of Okun-Ajah and Lekki were moved for a road that would reach the sea at Calabar.

Now the coast is being quietly abandoned, and the Niger Delta communities who expected a new artery will get a raised version of a road they already have. Nobody has told them. Nobody has asked them. They are discovering it, as I did, from a ministerial statement.

I WANT A FORENSIC AUDIT, NOT ANOTHER SPEECH

I am calling for the immediate publication of every signed contract, every amendment, every revised bill of quantities, every payment certificate, the full Deutsche Bank facility agreement, and the detailed maps of the original, gazetted and revised alignments.

I want the National Assembly to determine whether the procurement approvals granted for a ten-lane coastal highway can lawfully cover a six-lane inland rehabilitation.

I want the Auditor-General to establish exactly how much public money has been spent and on what.

I want the EFCC to examine the award, the pricing, the beneficial ownership of every company in the chain, and every payment made.

I want the Bureau of Public Procurement to explain how it certified a trillion-naira price with no competing bid to measure it against.

And I want Tinubu and Umahi to answer one question in writing: if the road has shrunk, why has the bill not?

IF EVERYTHING IS LEGITIMATE, PUBLISH THE DOCUMENTS. IF THE DOCUMENTS CANNOT BE PUBLISHED, NIGERIANS ARE ENTITLED TO DRAW THEIR OWN CONCLUSIONS.

I have not accused anyone of theft. I do not need to. The government has done something more damaging to itself than any accusation of mine: it has demonstrated that it does not know, or will not say, what it is building, where it is building it, how wide it will be or what it will finally cost. And it has handed that uncertainty, uncontested, to a man whose name Nigeria has already seen on a Swiss money-laundering judgment.

A $13 billion project. The president’s closest business associate. No tender. Foreign debt arranged by the contractor. Four changes of scope. Zero published documents.

Nigeria is not a private cash machine for the politically connected.

WHERE IS THE MONEY?

WHERE IS THE COAST?

WHO ORDERED THE CHANGES?

AND WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE FOR EVERY NAIRA?

Until those questions are answered with independently verifiable documents, this highway stands as a monument not to Renewed Hope, but to everything Nigerians were told had ended.

Kio Amachree
Letters from Stockholm
12 October 2026