By Sotu Godbless Oghenevwede
There is a particular kind of suffering that Nigerians have endured for too long, one that begins the moment you leave a city and attempt to travel anywhere by road. It is not merely discomfort. It is hours added to journeys that should take minutes, produce rotting in trucks that cannot reach markets, and lives lost on highways that have long become, by every honest description, death traps. For decades, administration after administration promised to fix this. Most did not.
That is what makes the announcement from the Federal Executive Council this week so significant, and worth celebrating. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has approved 27 road projects worth over N3.9 trillion across 15 states. This is not a campaign promise. It is a signed, costed, council-approved commitment to Nigerians from Adamawa to Lagos, from Yobe to Ekiti. And it deserves to be acknowledged for exactly what it is: the most ambitious single-session road infrastructure approval in recent Nigerian history.
The states covered by these approvals are not randomly selected. They represent some of the most infrastructurally neglected corridors in the country, and the Tinubu administration has gone after them deliberately and at scale. The road from Yola to Jalingo, linking Adamawa and Taraba was once a one-hour trip. It has become a four-hour ordeal, with commuters enduring potholes described by drivers as looking like "earth dams." The Yola-Mubi road was first contracted in the Obasanjo era and remained unfinished through successive governments. That era of abandonment is now being directly confronted.
Across the Middle Belt, farmers in Benue and Taraba have long struggled to get their produce to markets in Lagos or Port Harcourt, with an estimated 40 percent of food produced in the country never reaching the final consumer, largely due to transportation and logistics challenges. These are not abstract statistics, they are the mechanics of food inflation playing out in real time on broken roads. Recent studies estimate that 70 percent of federal roads are in urgent need of repairs, and projections warn that without major investment, the worsening state of Nigeria's roads could cost the economy as much as $5 billion annually by 2030.
This is the inheritance President Tinubu has chosen not to ignore.
What distinguishes this approval package is not just its scale, it is the thinking behind it. The single largest item, the re-award of the 409-kilometre dual carriageway in Niger State to Aliko Dangote at N1.8 trillion under the tax credit scheme, reflects a sophisticated financing philosophy. Rather than waiting indefinitely for budget allocations that inflation erodes before they are deployed, the tax credit mechanism channels private sector obligations directly into infrastructure delivery. It is an approach that turns corporate Nigeria into a partner in national development, and it is the kind of innovation one expects from a president who understands how economies like ours, are actually built.
The breadth of the remaining 26 projects is equally impressive. The N276 billion dualisation of the Ilorin-Ogbomoso Road addresses one of the most commercially vital corridors between the South-West and North-Central. The N104 billion rehabilitation of the Ilorin-Omorin-Ebe-Kabba-Obajana route opens up industrial logistics for Kwara and Kogi. The N86 billion reconstruction of the Enugu-Abakaliki Road with a flyover delivers long-overdue relief to the South-East. The Tungo-Karamti Road with five bridges, connecting Adamawa and Taraba at nearly N63 billion, begins to reunite communities that have been functionally cut off from each other for years.
And in Lagos, the commercial heartbeat of the nation — the approval of the full business case for the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway concession, with a directive to begin reconstruction of failed sections using longer-lasting concrete pavement, signals that this government is not just fixing roads but rethinking how they are built and maintained.
One of the most striking features of this announcement is its geographic reach. These 27 projects span the North-East, North-Central, South-West, and South-East. Adamawa, Yobe, and Taraba — states that have borne the compounded burden of insecurity and infrastructure neglect, sit alongside Oyo, Ekiti, Ebonyi, and Lagos on this list. In the North-East, rebuilding is tied directly to security stabilisation and humanitarian access, and the fact that this administration is investing there regardless speaks to a presidential vision that is truly national in scope.
The completion of the first 118-kilometre section of the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano Highway , valued at N137 billion and confirmed by the Works Minister, is further proof that under President Tinubu, approvals are moving from paper to pavement. Work on the remaining 164 kilometres is expected to be completed by November. This is real and measurable progress that even the opposition cannot deny.
The positives goes beyond the headlines, for instance, huelage companies report 30 to 50 percent higher maintenance costs due to road damage. Ports congestion worsens when hinterland evacuation is slow. Importers pay demurrage, which is passed on to consumers. In a country battling inflation, the road network is not a separate governance issue, it is inflationary infrastructure. Every naira spent fixing these roads is a naira invested in bringing down prices associated with transport cost, consequently reducing the cost of living.
N3.9 trillion in road investment, properly executed, will not merely move vehicles. It will move food faster, reduce logistics costs, open up agricultural value chains, attract investment into previously inaccessible terrains, and begin to close the infrastructure gap that has quietly suppressed Nigeria's economic potential for generations.
This is what governance looks like when it is serious. And as a proud member of the APC and a believer in the Renewed Hope agenda, I am not shy about saying so — President Tinubu is putting in the work. Now, it is over to every contractor, ministry officials, and implementing agencies accountable for seeing each of these 27 projects through to completion.
