The relationship between President Bola Tinubu and Gilbert Chagoury, the owner of the company awarded the N15.6 trillion Lagos-Calabar coastal highway project, has continued to raise questions about the propriety of the deal, especially amidst other priority projects competing for attention all over the country.
While there is consensus in many quarters that the coastal highway will serve as a signature project in terms of economic development when executed with all sense of appropriateness, pundits, however, believe a lot of issues did not add up, hence the barrage of questions around the motive and propriety of having the project at this time.
The federal government had confirmed not only the award of the contract to Hitech Construction Company, owned by the Chagoury family, but also gave approval for the release of N1.06 trillion for the first phase of the project, a development that experts have revealed contradicted the model adopted for the project.
The Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), which regulates private-public contracts, mandates the government to advertise all proposed projects so that interested contractors can submit bids, after which the Federal Executive Council, presided over by the president, is expected to make the final decision.
But the final decision was said to have been made without recourse to the ICRC provision, making several Nigerians, including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), question the seeming lack of due process in the award of the contract to Hitech.
While the Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, had explained that the reason for awarding the contract to Hitech without competitive bidding as laid down by the laws of the country was because of the company’s “track record”, the explanation and his revelation that each kilometre of the 700km-long road would gulp N4 billion further left many Nigerians befuddled.
The minister had also said that the contract was awarded on a counterpart-funding basis and not on a public-private partnership, as widely claimed.
