Paradox, in the sense that many of the narratives associated with this expressway are weird, inconsistent with what obtains elsewhere and symbolize a wisdom which only Nigerian runners of government have access to. A 127.6-kilometre-long (79.3 mi) expressway which connects Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State and Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and major artery into the northern, southern and eastern parts of Nigeria, it is the oldest expressway in Nigeria.

Awarded to Julius Berger Nigeria and Reynolds Construction Company Limited at an initial cost of 167 billion Nigerian Naira or $838,986,290, the construction was divided into two sections for the two companies to handle. While Berger handles 43.6 km stretch of the road, to wit the Lagos to Shagamu portion, RCC is saddled with the rest, which is Sagamu to Ibadan. Commissioned in August, 1978 by then Major General Olusegun Obasanjo, the expressway has conveniently morphed into a bottomless pit for consumption of cash, a potential cesspit of political corruption if a klieg is peered into it and a wisdom gourd which only runners of Nigeria have access to.

This wisdom gourd reminds me of a famous Yoruba folktale. By the way, in folkloric tales of Yorubaland which seem to have died the moment modernity meandered into the world, Tortoise and Snail play very central roles and representations. While Tortoise represents trickery, craftiness and greed, Snail represents smartness, alertness and native wisdom. On occasions where Tortoise and Snail spar in exhibition of wisdom, while Tortoise meets its waterloo, Snail excels. In their denotations, Yoruba preach the wisdom of the Snail and abhor the Tortoise signifier. Indeed, in one of their proverbs, they say that no matter how Tortoise thinks he is clever, he is outshone by the Snail, rendered as gbigbon ti ahun gbon, ehin l’o nto’gbin.

As is usual with the Siamese nature of riddles and folklores, riddles are always appetizers for the central folklore stories. Thus, this particular storyteller begins by asking, “Who can tell me the two tiny birds which effortlessly climb two hundred trees simultaneously?” When one of the children listeners, apparently the most brilliant one among them, replies that it is the eyes, then the storytelling begins.

Here it goes: Upon waking up one certain morning, centuries ago, Tortoise was consumed with the bother about how he could outwit the rest of the world. He then agreed with himself that he needed to acquire the whole of the wisdom existing in the whole world, so that no living being would be as wise as he was. To achieve this, Tortoise then began the process of acquisition of global knowledge. He walked all over the place to seek it. Holding a clay pot in his hands, his plan was that, whenever he found a shell of wisdom, he would drop it inside the clay pot. By the end of the week, Tortoise had succeeded in acquiring the total wisdom of the world. He was excited and celebrated this immensely. Then, wary of someone else appropriating this knowledge from him, he thought of where to warehouse the huge corpus of wisdom, away from access to other human beings.

Then, the tallest palm tree in the village came to his mind. With the clay pot tied to his chest, off he began to climb the tree. As he was about getting to the mouth of the tree, his legs slipped and the pot came crashing down. Totally downcast, he repeated the process thrice, with same result. As he did the third time, a villager watched him and counseled that his backside, rather than his chest, was where to tie the clay pot containing global wisdom. Persuaded to climb the tree again, Tortoise was almost at the top of the tree when he angrily threw the pot away. The moral intended by the framers of this folklore is that wisdom is communal and social which should not be restricted to personal usage.

No one can contest the fact that the Lagos/Ibadan expressway boasts of the hugest traffic in Nigeria. As the busiest inter-state route in the country with over 250,000 Passenger Car Unit (PCU) the largest of such in Africa, its construction was with an eye on it withstanding heavy volume of vehicle traffic, especially vehicles with high axle loads. Contract for its reconstruction was begun by former President Goodluck Jonathan in July, 2013 and the aim of its reconstruction was to shrink the time of travel for millions of commuters who travel on it daily. Since then, the road has witnessed several stasis and hiccups. Again, the Federal Executive Council approved an additional N80bn for the purpose of rehabilitating Section II of the Expressway which fell on the Sagamu to Ibadan axis. On several occasions, work had stalled embarrassingly on a number of occasions on the construction due largely to funding discrepancies.

Funding of the project initially became an issue. Concessioned to Bi-Courtney of Wale Babalakin, it was eventually terminated in a messy separation. The concession was initially for 25 years, for construction and maintenance of 105-kilometre expressway. A private finance initiative, it was expected that this would see the reconstruction through, providing 70% of the funds needed, with the Federal Government providing the rehabilitation of 30% of the cost. 

In 2016, the Infrastructure Bank Plc and Motorways Asset Limited was said to have secured the sum of N170 billion funding for the reconstruction of the expressway, through public-private partnership. This caused uproar in the parliament as its desirability became a subject of discussion.

In 2017, the year of its initial scheduled completion, before its postponement, while President Muhammadu Buhari was on medical vacation to the UK, his government, represented by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, requested a virement of the sum of N135.6bn into what it called “other pressing sub-heads” in the 2017 budget. Lawmakers subsequently reduced allocation to the road construction from N31billion to N10billion.

This necessitated the two contractors suspending work on the road, even as they cited mounting unpaid debts to them by the Federal Government.

As it is now, the Federal Government seems to appropriate and approximate all the wisdom of the world in one single pouch in the funding of the road construction. Earlier, it had announced that a #321million it recovered from late former Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, would be spent on the same project. Recently, it again announced that it was going to deploy the £4.2m loot recovered from James Ibori, former governor of Delta state, to fund three infrastructural projects, the Lagos–Ibadan, Abuja–Kano expressway and the second Niger bridge. The loot was seized from Ibori in 2012 after his conviction for fraud and money laundering by a UK court.

Many have argued that government should return the loot to the purse from where it was initially filched. The House of Representatives also recently directed government to stop its plan to spend the Ibori loot on the road, kicking against FG keeping the money. Dilemma in argument arose when such line of argument was reminded that Delta had, during the pendency of Ibori’s trial, claimed that no money was stolen from its purse.

Rather than manifesting, exhibiting and walking on the road of this Tortoise-wisdom-of-the-world, FG should let Nigerians know how much has been expended thus far, since 2013, on the Lagos/Ibadan expressway and how much is still needed. This nebulous voting of looted funds into the road construction, which leaves the actual figures spent shrouded in mystery and the fact that the true spending so far on the expressway exists solely in the mind of government, bears acute resemblance to Tortoise’s wily attempt to make the wisdom of the world resident solely in his head.

The post James Ibori, Lagos/Ibadan expressway and FG’s tortoise wisdom | By Festus Adedayo first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post James Ibori, Lagos/Ibadan expressway and FG’s tortoise wisdom | By Festus Adedayo appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

Lawan stated this on Monday while declaring open a one-day round-table discussion with the theme: “Addressing Nigeria’s Power Problems” organized by the Senate Committee on Power.

The Senate President declared that the privatization of the power sector in 2005 and 2013 was a grand scheme conceived with the intention to defraud Nigeria.

According to him, “For me if there’s any sector of our economy that is so important and yet so challenged, it is the power sector. I believe that this is a sector that needs a declaration of emergency.

“This is an opportunity for us in this round-table to exhaustively discuss not only the problems of the power sector in Nigeria but the solutions and way forward.

“The truth is that we all know what is wrong. What we really need to do is to have the political will to take on the challenges generally.

“From the electricity power reform of 2005 to the privatization of Gencos and Discos and to what is happening today, we know that everything is a fraud. If we play the ostrich, in the next ten years we will be talking about the same things.

“I think the time has come for us to have courage. I want to remind us, that we have signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. What will give us an edge is to have a competitive environment.

“Our industries and businesses must be able to produce things that can compete favourably with products produced in other countries in Africa. We are not in that position today, and we all know the consequences of that.

“Even our citizens, who have capital, will rather relocate to Ghana, produce whatever they want and bring to Nigeria to sell. Where does that leave our country? No employment opportunities; Nigeria becomes a dumping ground”, he lamented.

The Senate President, therefore, called for a review of the privatization exercise undertaken by the Goodluck Jonathan administration which led to a takeover of the power sector by private Generating Companies (Gencos) and Distribution Companies (Discos).

Lawan added  that the National Assembly would make a significant contribution to the reform of the power sector through enabling legislation required to turn around the fortunes of power generation and distribution in Nigeria.

“If we went wrong with our privatization of Gencos and Discos, the time has come to look into it.

“Whatever we have to do to review these things, we should do. We must do it in the interest of the people of this country. We must admit there was something done wrong.

“This round-table actually is an idea of the Senate, that we should come together to talk among ourselves. Ours is to provide legislative interventions, but we are also part of the government.

“Therefore, whatever that is required to support the executive arm of government to turn-around this sector, in fact we are more than prepared to do so through legislation.

“If we are going to amend the power sector reform, we are prepared to do that, and expeditiously. Tell us where the issues are, because we can’t afford to delay any action to make the power sector of this country perform.

“In the sixties, we were comparing ourselves with Indonesia, Malaysia and the rest, now we started comparing with Ghana, Togo. With all due respect, that tells us we are not making progress where other countries are.

“This round-table is an opportunity to come up with measurable roadmaps because we are not going to leave the implementation to the executive alone. We want to participate in every inch of the way.

“Every bit of what is to be done; we want to be part of it, so that we can contribute meaningfully to take the power sector to the next level.

“It is really disheartening that we are still talking about 4,000 megawatts. I don’t understand this. Other countries within Africa are talking of so much, even Ghana is three times better than what we are doing.”

He also called on the federal government to deploy the political will towards revamping Nigeria’s failing power sector. “We are yet the largest economy in Africa, for how long can we sustain that position?

“I believe that we have to declare a state of emergency on Power, and courageous decisions must be taken by the government”, the Senate President said.

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The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), in a statement disclosed that Mr Metuh made the revelation before Justice Okon Abang.

The erstwhile publicity secretary was said to have explained that the fund was for “a special national assignment” in the run-up to the 2015 general elections.

Metuh is being prosecuted by the anti-graft agency along with his company, Destra Investment, on seven counts bordering on money laundering to the tune of N400 million.

Reacting to questions from the prosecution team, Mr Metuh emphasized that there was never an instance where former President Goodluck Jonathan directly paid any money to him.

He insisted that the N400 million was for the national assignment as directed by the then President.

Upon being shown the statement of his account which had N6.6 million before an inflow of N400 million into it on November 24, 2014, the former PDP spokesman informed the court how he disbursed the money which he said was for a national assignment.

He said there was an outflow of N7.5 million from the amount through a cheque to a company, CNC Connect on December 2, 2014, and another payment of N21.7 million to late Chief Tony Anenih and N50 million to Kanayo/Olisah.

On that same date, Metuh narrated that there was another outflow of N31.5 million to one Richard Ehidioha, adding that two separate payments of N200 million and N300 million were made to Daniel Ford International also on December 4, 2014.

Other subsequent expenditures, according to him, include payments to CNC Connect in the sum of N70 million on December 15, 2014; N25 million to Abba Dabo on December 16, 2014, and N5 million to Mrs Kema Chikwe.

Metuh also told the court that a final report he submitted to the former president had all the expenditures of the said N400 million, captured in receipts and signatures for all payment of monies in cash and through several accounts for the special assignment.

He said he had about 19 accounts of which more than five were in Diamond Bank, adding that he made an investment of $2 million in cash in ARM, through its official, Miss Nneka Ararume.

After the cross-examination, Justice Abang adjourned the matter until Monday next week for the continuation of trial.

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