President Bola Tinubu has been urged to come clean on the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, which according to former Vice President Abubakar Atiku is shrouded in secrecy.
Atiku said in a statement that Nigerians deserve to know how much the contract will cost, the process that it was awarded, why the Federal Government is footing the bill when it was meant to be a Public, Private Partnership project and why is the project taking off at the Eko Atlantic City?
The first phase construction of the 700km Lagos-Calabar coastal highway has commenced with Hitech construction company handling the project. But Atiku wants Tinubu’s administration to answer questions being raised.
“The Tinubu administration cannot continue to respond to the public inquiry with insults. They must come clean on this project because Nigerians deserve to know the truth. I, therefore, present six posers to the administration,” said the statement made available by Atiku’s media adviser Paul Ibe
“1. How much is the total cost of the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway? 2. Why is the project being funded by the Nigerian government despite being a PPP? 3. Why is the project taking off from Chagoury’s Eko Atlantic? 4. Why is N1.06tn being spent on the pilot phase, which is just 47km?
“5. Why did the N1.06tn not get the approval of the National Assembly? 6. Why wasn’t there a competitive bidding for the project? 7. Finally, how did the Tinubu administration get the design as well as the right of way in just 7 months, since it claims the past administrations of Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari never touched the project?”
The President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, had, in a statement, told Atiku to get his facts right about the project.
“In his desperation to always want to hug the headlines as a self-appointed opposition leader, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has allowed himself to be led into a blind alley again by his poorly informed aides,” the statement read.
Onanuga said Abubakar made “false allusions” about the project in his “futile attempt to denigrate and find faults in the audacious and transformational” road construction initiative.
