A few days ago, I received a reliable tipoff informing me that the recently appointed Minister of Transportation, Engr. Mu’azu Jaji Sambo is apparently making moves to marginalise the Niger Delta region.
According to the tip-off, Engr. Sambo is trying to funnel what little money is available to him in the last few months of the Buhari administration, toward paying the contractor working on the Kano-Katsina-Maradi rail line.
This is apparently being done at the expense of the Port Harcourt – Maiduguri Rail line, which my source believed was unfair.
My reaction was one of neither approval nor disapproval. As we say in street lingo, I chose to “unlook” what should on the surface be a clear-cut case of ethnic prebendalism and tribal favouritism to add to Buhari’s multitude.
This time around, I believe that the failure of the outgoing administration to deliver what it had classified as a key infrastructure project could actually be good news for Port Harcourt and the Niger Delta in the long run.
Why is this? Just take a look at another project in the same neighbourhood.
The “Muhammadu Buhari Bridge”
In this column, I have repeatedly compared the Buhari administration to a group of disingenuous Nairaland trolls with a very loose grasp of the concept of facts, objective truth and evidence.
The administration has massacred young people at Lekki Toll Plaza only to bust out the infamous “Where are the bodies?” It has banned Twitter, then lied repeatedly about its reasons for unbanning Twitter, including promising that Twitter would “register in Nigeria” and “provide back end access to the government” – possibly 2 of the most egregiously unintelligent government lies ever told.
When it comes to infrastructure, the same pattern of governance by telling lies is in evidence, and nothing illustrates this better than the 2nd Niger Bridge.
Having tried unsuccessfully to claim credit for the Abuja-Kaduna railway whose track laying was completed as far back as November 2014, the Nairaland Troll administration set its sights on claiming credit for the biggest federal infrastructure project to be located in the southeast for decades.
The 2nd Niger Bridge, a Public-Private-Partnership project which was already 35% completed and almost entirely paid for before the Trolls took office in 2015, was suddenly recast as a “Buhari legacy.”
This bridge, which went from 0 to 35 percent complete in 2014 alone, had work on it stopped as soon as the Trolls came in. The Trolls then revised the approved contract sum, inflating it by an eye-watering 150 percent before dragging out its implementation over the course of 7 years.
The initial approved design of the Bridge, which included a standard gauge rail bridge was changed, leaving just a road going to and from.
In other words, whenever the economically obvious decision is made to connect the southeast to the Midwest and on to Lagos via standard gauge rail which has a design speed of up to 160km/hr, a fresh bridge must be constructed.
This could have been done using the initial design approved under an actual president in 2014, but the Aso Rock Troll and his minions carried out a malicious piece of economic sabotage against a part of the country that he later openly threatened with genocide on Twitter.
The bridge incidentally, will be subject to a toll fee when completed and in use, meaning that users will have to pay for 150 percent more project expense than was needed, for half of the value they were supposed to get. And to add final insult to injury, the Troll then named the bridge “Muhammadu Buhari Bridge,” a move calculated to be nothing more than an insult to the political constituency he hates so much.
PH – Maiduguri: Long May It Fail!
The case of the purported rail line linking southeast to northeast is an even worse all-round proposition, and a symbol of just how abysmal a thinker and planner former Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi was.
Having famously built the world’s most expensive non-functional monorail white elephant monstrosity in Port Harcourt during his tenure as governor, it perhaps came as little surprise that Rotimi Amaechi turned out to be a Transport Minister the way a cheerleader is a footballer.
That is to say, incredibly clueless and out of his depth.
While the doomed nature of the white elephant pie-in-the-sky being constructed from Kano to Maradi is well known and has been well documented, that did not stop Amaechi from committing billions of Chinese loan dollars to building out this flight of fantasy using the modern, faster and more expensive standard gauge.
Exactly what trade volumes justify committing such resources to build a fast rail link in a region whose only significant formal economic activity is farming, only Amaechi and his erstwhile boss, the Troll can answer.
The bigger problem however, was that while Amaechi was committing funds to be repaid by our unborn children to the Kano-Maradi chimera, he could not even protect his own state’s interest and ensure that Rivers State got at least a standard gauge line to somewhere it could have a useful economic relationship with, such as Aba which is 100km from Port Harcourt.
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Replacing the aged narrow gauge rail line between both cities would cut travel time by over 60 percent and potentially birth Nigeria’s first modern viable cargo rail line.
Such ideas were far beyond the mental station of Amaechi however, who I observe to be as empty as he is a bloviator – an airhead who thinks he is Aristotle. A man who genuinely believed he could be president, as if he was ever in the picture.
Instead, all Amaechi could get for Rivers State was a commitment to reconstruct the aged narrow gauge line built in colonial times to link Maiduguri to Port Harcourt.
Perhaps the economic pointlessness of a rail line to Maiduguri of all places could even be excused if it were at least a standard gauge line. “Build it and they will come” rarely works in Nigeria, but at least the jury would be out for a few years at least.
But even that was too much for the self-proclaimed “Lion Of Ubima,” who dutifully delivered a modern, state-of-the-art high-speed railway to nowhere to please the Troll and his men, but could only deliver derelict colonial infrastructure destined to crumble into irrelevance and disrepair to his own people.
I believe that spending development funds to build a standard gauge rail line from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri is not only economically unjustifiable but also full-on economic sabotage and administrative malfeasance of the sort that should attract jail terms.
So to Engr. Sambo who probably thinks he is marginalising other people to the benefit of those he identifies with, I say well done sir.
Please continue to frustrate that travesty until you leave office. It must never be built.
When Port Harcourt does eventually get a rail line, it should be an economic booster rocket.
Not an expensive insult.
