Two Express Road Rehabilitation Projects

Abstract

The Lagos-Ibadan and Lagos-Badagry roads were built in the 1970s and 1990s, but had become outgrown by traffic needs and catastrophically congested, so widening and refurbishing projects were initiated. The Lagos-Ibadan Road will likely be completed in 2022, but it is not an example of a good project. It was started with a private–public partnership (PPP) scheme, which was then sabotaged after a government change, so funding became unstable leading to walk outs by contractors. Finally, the government repossessed the project and may finally get to completion, but only after design degradations, delays and overruns.The Lagos-Ibadan project is stalled, an example of overambitious design, unreliable funding, questionable accounting and misrepresentations to the public, with excuses that point away from the sources of the problems. The currently visible final result is a reduction of the project to “palliative measures” (i.e. repairing what is there rather than the expansion that the project started out to achieve).