Comrade Joseph Evah, an activist and the coordinator of the Ijaw Monitoring Group, has urged President Bola Tinubu to decentralize the current Lagos-Calabar superhighway project.
Eva stated that in order to improve timely delivery, the Calabar portion of the project should be turned over to a different group of contractors in an interview with Hotline magazine in Lagos.
Hitech Construction Company Limited was given the go-ahead to build the 700-kilometer Lagos-Calabar coastal highway under an engineering, procurement, construction, and financing (EPC+F) arrangement, in which the contractor assumes the majority of the risk and the federal government provides matching funding. The project will cross nine states.
The first phase of the project, which spans 47.47 kilometers from Lagos, was started by the federal government in March of 2024.
Prominent opposition figures, including Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, have criticized the federal administration for the initiative.
In an interview with our correspondent in Lagos, Evah stated that hiring more contractors would help to accelerate the highway’s construction.
He requested that Tinubu learn from the way the Babangida administration handled the Third Mainland bridge project in the 1990s by appointing several contractors.
Aside from the risk of hiring a lone contractor and any other anxiety, that place is swampy. We are talking about sand-filling and all that; we are not dealing with rocky ground or anything like that. It would be challenging for one contractor to get from one end to the other if military leader Babangida decided to do it, even simply within Lagos. That was in 1991. He made the decision to award the contract to two or three vendors.
We will not be satisfied with the president if that is not done, and we will address the matter. “There is a hidden agenda in the project,” we will declare. If not, we anticipate that the Lagos axis would relocate to Calabar and the Calabar side contractors will move down to Lagos, where they will meet in the middle. That’s how we can demonstrate that we’ve been supported,” Evah remarked.
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