There are moments in a nation’s life when budget lines cease to be technical matters and become moral documents. Nigeria has reached such a moment. The federal government’s decision to borrow USD 1.26 billion to construct just 55.7 kilometres of the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway at a time when critical infrastructure across the country lies abandoned for “lack of funds” – is not merely an economic choice. It is an ideological declaration about who the Nigerian state exists to serve.
Last week’s State House press release was triumphant. It spoke of “landmark financing,” “bankability,” “global confidence,” and “defining moments.” International banks were named, ESG standards invoked, and advisory firms paraded like trophies. Yet what the statement carefully avoided was any engagement with the social reality against which this borrowing is occurring – mass poverty, collapsing public services, runaway inflation, food insecurity, and a road network outside a few elite corridors that has become synonymous with danger, delay, and death. The raw numbers are staggering. USD 1.26 billion – borrowed money – will deliver less than 56 kilometres of road between Eleko in Lekki and Ode-Omi. This comes on top of an earlier USD 747 million for another section of the same project. Combined, Nigeria is committing over USD 2 billion to barely a sliver of highway, while pleading fiscal constraint when asked to complete long-abandoned federal roads in the North, Middle Belt, and even large parts of the South-East.
From a welfarist perspective, this is indefensible. Welfare-oriented governance begins with a simple ethical test – does public spending reduce suffering, expand opportunity, and correct inequality? The Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway, in its current form and scale, fails that test spectacularly.
Across northern Nigeria, federal highways that once linked farms to markets, communities to hospitals, and states to one another have collapsed into symbols of state abandonment. Projects in Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Adamawa, Borno, Yobe, Taraba, and Bauchi remain frozen in time – equipment rusting, contractors gone, communities stranded. These are not prestige routes; they are survival corridors. When they fail, food prices rise, medical emergencies turn fatal, insecurity spreads, and local economies suffocate.
Yet we are told there is no money.
And then, suddenly, USD 1.26 billion appears – mobilised effortlessly, with foreign underwriters, international lawyers, ESG consultants, and glossy press releases – to service what is, in effect, a presidential pet project hugging some of the country’s most commercially attractive coastline. This contradiction is not accidental. It reflects a governing philosophy that privileges visibility over utility, spectacle over substance, and elite convenience over mass welfare. The opportunity cost of this choice is enormous. USD 1.26 billion could rehabilitate thousands of kilometres of existing federal roads nationwide. It could complete dozens of abandoned projects already halfway done. It could fund rural feeder roads that would immediately lower food prices by easing access to markets. It could revitalise irrigation schemes, storage facilities, and agro-processing hubs. It could strengthen primary healthcare, expand public education infrastructure, or shore up social protection for millions pushed to the brink by inflation.
Instead, Nigeria is borrowing heavily – adding to a debt burden that future generations will service – to pour concrete into one of the most expensive road segments in the nation’s history. Defenders of the project argue that the financing is “creative,” fully underwritten, and compliant with international environmental and social standards. But financial engineering is not a substitute for social wisdom. A loan, no matter how elegantly structured, is still a claim on future public resources. It will be repaid not by abstract “markets,” but by Nigerian citizens – through taxes, reduced services, inflationary pressures, or future austerity.
A welfarist state asks a different set of questions from a market-obsessed one. Not: Is this project bankable? But: Is it necessary? Is it fair? Is it the best use of scarce public borrowing capacity in a country where millions are hungry?
Equally troubling is the regional signal this decision sends. Nigeria is already a nation frayed by perceptions – and realities – of uneven development. When massive resources are channelled into a single, elite-heavy corridor in the South-West while infrastructure in the North decays, the message is unmistakable. It deepens alienation, fuels resentment, and undermines the fragile sense of national equity upon which unity depends. Development, if it is to be legitimate, must be spatially and socially inclusive. It must be seen, felt, and experienced across regions not concentrated where political power, financial capital, and elite influence already converge.
There is also a deeper ideological failure at work here. The Tinubu administration’s infrastructure narrative borrows heavily from neoliberal development orthodoxy: flagship projects, investor confidence, global validation, and debt-financed growth. What is missing is a welfare state consciousness – an understanding that infrastructure is not an end in itself, but a means to human development. Roads are not monuments. They are social infrastructure. Their value lies not in how much they cost, but in how many lives they improve.
A government serious about “Renewed Hope” would begin with the invisible Nigerians: rural farmers trapped by impassable roads, traders losing goods to delays and extortion, patients dying en route to hospitals, students cut off from schools, communities isolated and vulnerable to violence. It would fix what is broken before announcing what is shiny.
Instead, we are witnessing a politics of grandeur amid generalised deprivation. This is not merely poor prioritisation; it is a redistribution upward. Public debt is being accumulated in the name of national development, but its immediate benefits accrue disproportionately to elite commercial interests – real estate, logistics hubs, and high-end trade corridors – while the costs are socialised across a population already stretched beyond endurance.
History is unkind to governments that confuse concrete with compassion. Nations are not built by landmark projects alone, but by the quiet, consistent provision of welfare-enhancing public goods. Nigeria does not suffer from a lack of ambition; it suffers from a lack of empathy in budgeting. Until public finance is reordered around people rather than prestige – until abandoned roads matter as much as coastal highways, and rural lives matter as much as investor confidence – no amount of billion-dollar announcements will translate into genuine progress.
A state that borrows extravagantly for symbolism while pleading poverty for social need is not renewing hope. It is institutionalising inequality, entrenching neglect, and writing a fiscal story whose burden will be borne by the very citizens it has chosen to overlook.