LAST week, the House of Representatives finally stepped into President Bola Tinubu’s Lagos – Calabar Coastal Highway controversy with a resolve to ensure that due process is fully restored.

Nigerians woke up some weeks ago to the commencement of work on easily the most expensive infrastructural project in Nigeria’s history: a 700 kilometre 10-lane bimodal road/rail autobahn that will cost N4bn per kilometre with estimated 180 bridges of various specifications inbetween.

The National Assembly, which is mandated to consider contract proposals of this magnitude, debate, approve and appropriate funds for them, was nowhere to be found in its conception. It took the public queries raised by opposition leaders: Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, to bring some of the controversial dimensions of the project to the knowledge of unsuspecting Nigerians.

On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the House of Reps affirmed that the project had no legislative approval. It called on the Minsters of Works, Finance and Justice to ensure that all the “project guarantees and credit enhancement instruments” are brought to the National Assembly for approval. The resolution was subsequent to a motion brought by Austin Achado (APC-Benue) titled: “Urgent Need to Investigate the Procurement Process and Award of Contract for the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway”.

Nigerians can heave a sigh of relief that, at last, the federal legislature is waking up to its constitutional mandate of adequate representation on a humongous project that will impose such a huge cost on every taxpayer.

If this project had been allowed to proceed without effective legislative intervention and approval, it would have been the most expensive act of impunity ever. Even military regimes always presented their spending proposals for approval to the Supreme Military Council, SMC, or Provisional Ruling Council, PRC, before execution. 

Even if the gesture was often a mere rubber-stamping of the Head of State’s proposal, it at least allowed for due process and wider inputs.

For an elected government to try railroading such a mammoth project without the approval of the National Assembly is contemptuous of the feelings of the public, more so as many multi-billion naira investments have already been avoidably demolished despite an existing, safer federal right of way.

The legislative arm exists in a democracy to checkmate this sort of executive excess. Where the legislature is effectively sidelined or voluntarily abdicates its constitutional responsibility to the people, that democracy is dead.

We call on the National Assembly to be thorough in this assignment. They should query the priority of this project at a time all the major highway trunks throughout the country are in disrepair, and save the nation from the false allures of a white elephant, if need be.