Chapter 6: Broken Bridges

The World Bank says Nigeria needs $100 billion in infrastructure investment every year for thirty years. That estimate — first published in the World Bank's Infrastructure for Development in Nigeria: Constraints, Gaps, and Options (2020) and reaffirmed in the Country Partnership Framework 2023–2027 — amounts to a statement of arithmetic impossibility. At the official exchange rate of approximately ₦1,386 to the dollar in January 2026, $100 billion translates to roughly ₦138.6 trillion per year, every year, for three decades. The Federal Government's total 2025 budget appropriation was approximately ₦54.9 trillion. The entire budget, spent repeatedly, would not meet the infrastructure need. Against this ledger, the ₦16 trillion that Nigeria spent on debt service in 2025 — the arithmetic of which is the subject of Chapter 7 — constitutes a veto on every road, bridge, and railway that the state might otherwise have built.

Of the ₦18.53 trillion appropriated for capital expenditure in the 2025 federal budget, only ₦834.8 billion was released to Ministries, Departments, and Agencies between January and July 2025 — a capital budget execution rate of 7.72 per cent.

Budget Office of the Federation, Budget Implementation Report (cited in Punch, February 2026)

The Appropriation and the Release

The National Assembly passed the 2025 Appropriation Act with ₦18.53 trillion earmarked for capital projects across all ministries and agencies. That figure represented the legislative branch's judgment of what Nigeria needed to build, repair, and maintain. By July 2025, the Budget Office of the Federation had released ₦834.8 billion against that appropriation. The gap between ₦18.53 trillion and ₦834.8 billion is not a rounding error. The un-released portion amounts to ₦17.7 trillion in appropriated capital that never left the Treasury. The government subsequently directed that 70 per cent of unspent 2025 capital allocations be rolled over into 2026, treating deferred infrastructure as a scheduling convenience rather than a cumulative deficit. The Abuja–Kaduna–Zaria–Kano expressway reconstruction, the completion of the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, and the East–West Road dualisation were among the projects deferred. They will wait another year, or longer, while the debt service clock keeps running.

Senator Saidu Ahmed Alkali, Minister of Transportation, told a joint committee of the National Assembly in February 2026 that his ministry's capital releases stood at roughly one per cent of its ₦256.73 billion appropriation and were largely not cash-backed. The Nigerian Institute of Transport Technology and the Federal University of Transportation, Daura, recorded average overhead utilisation of about 57 per cent with no capital releases at all. The Ministry of Power fared worse. Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, confirmed at a House of Representatives hearing in March 2025 that the ministry received zero capital release through the first quarter of 2025. A ministry tasked with overseeing a national grid that collapses monthly received not one naira of its capital budget for three consecutive months.

The phrase "not cash-backed" deserves attention: it means that even the one per cent released to Transportation existed only as a book entry, not as money that contractors could draw down to pour concrete or lay track. Senator Alkali's testimony exposed a system in which appropriations function as political promises while releases function as fiscal fiction. Contractors who signed agreements based on budgeted amounts discovered that the Treasury had no intention of funding those agreements within the fiscal year. The gap between legislative approval and Treasury release is the first point at which infrastructure dies.

The Budget Office has not published a Budget Implementation Report beyond the third quarter of 2024. No updated capital execution data has appeared since then — itself a measure of institutional opacity. A state that cannot tell its citizens what percentage of the roads budget was spent is a state that cannot be held accountable for the roads that remain unbuilt. The Open Treasury Portal, launched in 2020 under the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, was designed to close this opacity. The portal publishes contract awards but not execution data, payment vouchers but not proof of delivery. A contractor can be paid in full while the road remains unpaved, and the portal will record the payment as an executed transaction. The gap between appropriation and release is only the first leak.

The second leak is the gap between release and actual spending — the point at which money leaves a ministry's account and is supposed to become concrete, steel, and labour. No federal agency publishes that second gap with regularity. The pattern of deliberate under-release has deep roots. Between 2015 and 2025, federal capital budget execution rates have rarely exceeded 60 per cent in any fiscal year, and in most years the figure has fallen below 40 per cent. The 7.72 per cent recorded in January–July 2025 is an extreme, but the direction is not new. Each year, the National Assembly appropriates sums that the Budget Office knows it cannot release, because the revenue does not exist or because the revenue that does exist is pre-committed to debt service, personnel costs, and statutory transfers. The appropriation becomes a political ritual — a statement of intent rather than a plan of action.

The question is not why so little was released. The question is where the released ₦834.8 billion went once it left the Budget Office — and whether it reached the contractors, the steel, or the asphalt it was supposed to buy. Some portion went to personnel costs disguised as capital expenditure. Some portion went to debt service on earlier project loans. Some portion was returned to the Treasury as unspent balances. The exact distribution is not published. That arithmetic is the subject of Chapter 7. What this chapter establishes is the scale of the gap: ₦17.7 trillion in appropriated capital that was not released in a single fiscal year, while the same government collected ₦21.6 trillion in tax revenue. The money exists. The mechanism to move it from collection to construction does not.

The mechanism of under-release is not accidental. The Budget Office operates within a cash-management framework that prioritises debt service, personnel emoluments, and statutory transfers above capital projects. When revenue falls short of projection — as it did in 2025 when naira volatility reduced the dollar value of oil receipts — the capital budget is the first item compressed. The National Assembly, in appropriating ₦18.53 trillion for capital expenditure, knew or should have known that the revenue to fund it was not available. The appropriation serves a political purpose: it allows legislators to tell constituents that projects are "in the budget." The release serves a fiscal reality: the Treasury does not have the money. The contractor, waiting for a mobilisation payment that never arrives, learns that the budget is a promise without a date.

The release becomes a fiscal triage decision, made behind closed doors at the Budget Office, about which projects will receive fractions of their approved funding and which will receive nothing at all. A road contractor who has hired equipment and labour based on a signed contract worth ₦5 billion discovers in July that only ₦200 million has been released. The equipment is demobilised, the labour dismissed, and the project paused until the next appropriation cycle. By then, the partially completed road has deteriorated further, and the cost to resume work has risen. This is the capital budget death spiral: less release leads to less construction, which leads to less economic growth, which leads to less revenue, which justifies the next round of under-release. The spiral has been tightening for two decades.

The debt service veto operates silently. In 2025, the Federal Government appropriated ₦16 trillion for debt service — domestic and external combined. That figure consumed approximately 29 per cent of the entire federal budget. The DMO's Medium-Term Debt Strategy 2024–2027 raised the debt-to-GDP ceiling from 40 per cent to 60 per cent, creating headroom that the government has used with evident enthusiasm. Domestic debt service in 2025 consumed ₦8.61 trillion, of which 95.7 per cent was interest rather than principal repayment. The state is not reducing its debt. The state is refinancing its debt at higher interest rates in a depreciating currency. Every naira spent on interest is a naira that cannot be released to FERMA, to the Nigerian Railway Corporation, or to the Federal Ministry of Works.

The debt service figure is not an abstract fiscal indicator. That figure is the specific mechanism by which the capital budget is asphyxiated. The asphyxiation is not accidental. Such a strategy prioritises refinancing over reduction, choking the capital budget year after year. The construction sector contracts when capital is withheld. In 2024, the National Bureau of Statistics recorded that the construction sector shrank by approximately 2.3 per cent, even as the overall economy grew. The sector that should have been expanding to meet the infrastructure gap was shrinking because the capital budget was not released. The under-release of capital is not merely a project management failure. Such under-release creates a macroeconomic drag that reduces tax revenue, destroys jobs, and deepens the very fiscal crisis that caused the under-release in the first place. Skilled artisans — masons, steel-fixers, surveyors — have emigrated to Ghana and Rwanda in search of contracts that pay on time.

The Road That Was Never Maintained

The Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) is the caretaker for 35,000 kilometres of federal trunk roads. In 2024, FERMA was appropriated ₦103.3 billion. The Office of the Accountant-General released only ₦41.282 billion, and FERMA utilised ₦40.287 billion. Muhammad Bello Goronyo, Minister of State for Works, described the agency's 2025 budget proposal of ₦64.88 billion as "grossly inadequate." FERMA estimates that it requires over ₦700 billion annually to maintain federal roads to acceptable standards. The agency received less than 6 per cent of that need in 2024, and it asked for even less in 2025. A road maintenance agency that formally requests less money than it received the previous year — while knowing that even the previous year's sum met only 6 per cent of its requirement — is an agency that has learned to budget for failure.

FERMA's 2025 performance review reported maintaining 200.82 kilometres of roads, patching 31,574 square metres of potholes, and making 1,655.89 kilometres "motorable." The word is revealing. "Motorable" does not mean paved, safe, or durable. It means passable, for now, until the next rainy season. For a 35,000-kilometre network, these figures describe triage, not maintenance. The agency's equipment fleet includes machinery donated by the Government of Japan worth ₦3.3 billion, commissioned in 2024. Foreign aid is filling gaps that the federal budget structurally cannot cover. In 2026, FERMA has proposed a budget of ₦229.99 billion, more than triple its 2025 request. Even if fully appropriated and released, that amount would still be less than a third of the agency's estimated annual need. The maintenance void is not a funding shortfall. The shortfall represents a structural under-release that has persisted across every administration since FERMA was established in 2002. No administration has fully funded road maintenance. None has come close.

The economic cost of this maintenance void is measured in haulage rates, travel time, and vehicle lifespan. A truck carrying goods from Lagos to Kano faces over 1,000 kilometres of federal highway, multiple security checkpoints, and unpredictable delays caused by failed sections. In early 2023, a truckload of agricultural produce cost approximately ₦900,000 to haul from Lagos to Kano. By late 2023, the same journey cost ₦2.5 million — a 178 per cent increase in under twelve months. That increase reflected the cost of navigating roads that had not been maintained, of replacing tyres and axles damaged by potholes, and of the time value lost to traffic congestion at failed sections. The Lagos–Kano corridor is the economic spine of Nigeria. When it decays, the entire national market pays a premium.

The haulage cost increase is not evenly distributed. Agricultural producers in the North bear the largest burden because their products must travel the farthest on the worst roads. A bag of rice grown in Kebbi State and consumed in Lagos pays a transport premium that reflects the failure of the Abuja–Kaduna–Zaria–Kano road, the Lokoja–Abuja corridor, and the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway. That premium is not captured in the Consumer Price Index as a separate line item. The premium is buried in the food inflation that reached 40.53 per cent in April 2024. The road failure and the price inflation are the same phenomenon observed from different ends of the supply chain.

The human cost is harder to quantify but no less real. Bus passengers on the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway face journey times that have doubled since the road was reconstructed, not because the road failed entirely but because emergency repairs narrow carriageways and create bottlenecks. Accident rates on federal highways have risen as drivers swerve around potholes into oncoming traffic. Commercial vehicle operators report replacing suspensions and shock absorbers at three times the normal rate. These costs do not appear in the federal budget. They appear in household budgets, in the price of rice at the market, and in the wear on the vehicles that families depend upon for their livelihoods. The state does not measure these costs because the state does not maintain the roads.

The East–West Road is the single most documented infrastructure failure in the Niger Delta. The road was originally conceived in 2006 under the Obasanjo administration, awarded to multiple contractors including Julius Berger Nigeria Plc and Reynolds Construction Company Limited, with an initial contract value of approximately ₦349 billion. Nearly two decades later, the road remains incomplete. Section I, traversing Rivers State from Port Harcourt through Eleme and Ogoni territory toward the Akwa Ibom border, has seen partial completion after repeated cost revisions. Section II, crossing through Andoni, Opobo, Ikot Abasi, Eket, and Oron in Akwa Ibom State toward Calabar in Cross River State, has progressed in fragments.

Communities that have lived with construction dust and detours for nineteen years include Ogoni towns in Rivers State, fishing settlements along the Andoni coast, and trading centres in Oron and Calabar South. The road was supposed to connect them. Instead, it has become a permanent construction site that demonstrates how long a project can survive without ever being finished. The environmental degradation along the East–West Road corridor is inseparable from the construction failure. Uncovered laterite and construction debris have washed into waterways during rainy seasons, damaging fishing grounds in Andoni and Opobo. Heavy trucks diverted onto temporary access roads have compacted farmland and destroyed drainage channels in Ikot Abasi and Eket. The communities along the route have borne the costs of construction without receiving the benefits of a completed highway.

The East–West Road failure has a direct impact on Nigeria's oil infrastructure. The road was designed to provide all-weather access to the Niger Delta's oil-producing communities, enabling equipment movement and emergency response. Without it, oil companies rely on helicopters and barges for access — transport modes that are far more expensive and far less reliable. The added cost feeds into the production economics of the Joint Ventures, reducing the already thin margins that discourage investment in new wells. A road that was meant to facilitate oil production has instead become a constraint on it, nearly two decades after construction began.

In January 2025, Minister of Works David Umahi set an April 2025 deadline for the completion of Section II-II from Ahoada to Kaiama, awarded to Setraco Nigeria Ltd. Minister Umahi also threatened to revoke the contract of another contractor on the same road for missing deadlines, BusinessDay reported on 11 January 2025. The total amount appropriated across federal budgets for the East–West Road since 2006 runs into the trillions of naira. The percentage completed as of 2025 is approximately two-thirds of the full dualisation, with critical sections in Akwa Ibom and Cross River still requiring surfacing, drainage, and bridge works. Setraco Nigeria Ltd's failure to meet the April 2025 deadline on Section II-II is not an isolated event. The pattern of missed deadlines and contract revisions has characterised the entire project since 2006. Each new administration announces a new completion date. Each date passes without the road being finished.

The Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, originally awarded at a contract value of ₦213 billion to Julius Berger Nigeria Plc and Reynolds Construction Company Limited, was substantially reconstructed yet required an additional ₦30 billion to complete outstanding sections as of February 2025. Minister Umahi disclosed this figure in The Nation on 4 February 2025. The outstanding work included 8.55 kilometres of the Lagos-bound carriageway — a gap in a road that had already consumed more than two hundred billion naira. The Julius Berger and RCC joint venture completed the bulk of the reconstruction between 2013 and 2022, but successive rainy seasons and heavy truck traffic have degraded sections that were not fully sealed, requiring the additional intervention.

The Abuja–Kaduna–Zaria–Kano expressway reconstruction, originally awarded in 2017 at ₦155.7 billion, has been re-scoped under a new arrangement costing ₦777 billion, with completion now projected for 2026, Punch reported in April 2025. The original contract, which included Julius Berger Nigeria Plc for emergency repairs and subsequent reconstruction phases, did not deliver a completed highway within its initial scope or timeline. Each of these roads has been rebuilt, in part, at three to five times the cost of maintaining them. Nigeria keeps choosing the more expensive option.

The political and procurement systems reward new contracts over old obligations. A new contract creates opportunities for variation orders, subcontractor appointments, and political patronage. Maintenance creates none of these. Bridges are built without adequate drainage, causing approach roads to wash away within two rainy seasons. Asphalt is laid without proper sub-base preparation, creating the familiar pattern of smooth surface over crumbling foundation. Contractors are paid for completion certificates while defects liability periods are ignored or waived. FERMA's staff have the technical expertise to recognise these failures. What they lack is the money to fix them and the institutional autonomy to insist on standards when political pressure demands speed. In January 2025, the Senate Committee on FERMA expressed astonishment at the agency's proposed budget, wondering why so much attention is paid to building new roads at the expense of maintaining existing ones. The question answers itself. New roads are photographed. Pothole patches are not.

The culture of Nigerian infrastructure governance is construction, not stewardship. New roads are announced with fanfare, commissioned by presidents, and named after politicians. Maintenance is invisible, unphotographed, and underfunded. The Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, the Abuja–Kaduna road, and the East–West Road have all required repeated emergency rehabilitations because routine maintenance was skipped for decades. The cost of rebuilding a failed road is typically three to five times the cost of maintaining it. Nigeria chooses the more expensive option every time, not because it prefers waste but because the incentive structure makes waste the rational choice. A contractor who builds a substandard road will likely be awarded the contract to rebuild it. A civil servant who maintains a road properly receives no promotion. The system selects for construction, not quality.

The Train That Derailed Twice

The Lagos–Ibadan standard gauge railway opened in June 2021, spanning 157 kilometres with an additional 7-kilometre branch line, built by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) at a cost of approximately $1.5 billion. By March 2024, the line had operated for 1,000 days and transported over 2 million passengers. National Bureau of Statistics data for 2025 show that rail passenger traffic across all Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) lines reached 3.89 million, generating ₦7.77 billion in revenue. The NRC exceeded its 2025 passenger revenue target of ₦7 billion, collecting ₦7.46 billion — an 11 per cent overrun. Freight revenue climbed to ₦3.02 billion in 2025, up from ₦347.8 million in 2021, a near tenfold increase in four years. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, the NRC moved 181,520 tons of cargo, up 13 per cent year-on-year. These numbers suggest a railway system finding its economic footing. They also obscure who is doing the work.

The Lagos–Ibadan line works because it is new, because it runs through Nigeria's densest economic corridor, and because CCECC built it with Chinese financing and Chinese construction standards. The corridor connects Lagos, the commercial capital, to Ibadan, the largest city in the Southwest, passing through Ogun State's emerging industrial zones. The population density and commercial activity along this axis generate ridership that other lines cannot replicate. The Abuja–Kaduna line, by contrast, serves a corridor with lower population density and higher security risk. The Lagos–Ibadan success is not a counterargument to the infrastructure failure documented in this chapter. The line demonstrates what is possible when foreign contractors build new assets with foreign financing — and serves as a warning that such conditions cannot be replicated across a continent-sized country.

In October 2024, the NRC granted CCECC a three-year licence to operate freight services on the Lagos–Ibadan line — the first standard-gauge freight licence issued in Nigeria. In February 2025, the NRC and APM Terminals Apapa relaunched the Apapa–Ibadan freight service on a fixed schedule. The passenger and freight growth is real, but much of it is being delivered by concessionaires and contractors because the NRC lacks the rolling stock, the maintenance culture, and the institutional memory to do the job itself. Whether the line will still work in 2035 depends on whether the NRC maintains the track, the signalling, and the rolling stock with the same precision that CCECC used to build them. The line cannot scale to other corridors because the NRC has not demonstrated that it can maintain what it already has.

The freight potential of the Lagos–Ibadan line remains largely unrealised. The corridor connects the Lagos ports to the industrial zones of Ogun State and the agricultural processing centres of Oyo State. In a functioning railway system, this line would carry containerised imports, cement, fertiliser, and manufactured goods at a fraction of road haulage cost. Instead, freight volumes are constrained by the NRC's lack of rolling stock, the absence of modern marshalling yards, and the six-to-nine-month procurement delay for spare parts. The line moves 181,520 tons per quarter. A comparable line in a country with functioning rail infrastructure would move that volume in a week. The gap between potential and actual is not a failure of engineering. The shortfall represents a failure of the institutional architecture that was supposed to turn engineering into output.

The dependence on concessionaires is not a policy preference. Such dependence represents a necessity born of institutional incapacity. In 2025, the NRC was allocated ₦39.18 billion. Of that sum, only ₦1 billion was earmarked for spare parts — including lubricants for locomotives, coaches, and wagons — and ₦2.79 billion for railway rehabilitation and repairs, according to the corporation's 2025 budget proposal reported by Railway Supply in January 2025. The 2026 budget proposal, analysed by The PUNCH in January 2026, shows the situation worsening: total allocation fell to ₦34.24 billion, with spare parts procurement cut to ₦700 million while personnel costs consumed ₦22.38 billion. A railway system that spends 33 times more on its workers than on its maintenance is not a railway. Such an organisation is a payroll with trains.

The NRC has not recruited sufficient engineers in over a decade. Its training programmes, administered through the Nigerian Institute of Transport Technology in Zaria, graduated over 6,000 professionals in 2024, but the corporation's own staff rarely benefit from refresher courses. Procurement of original equipment manufacturer parts requires six to nine months of bureaucratic navigation through the Federal Ministry of Transportation and the Bureau of Public Procurement. By the time the purchase order is approved, the defective component has often damaged adjacent systems. Delays of this length are normal, not exceptional.

When tracks are washed out by heavy rains, as NRC Managing Director Dr. Kayode Opeifa acknowledged in May 2025, the corporation lacks the emergency response capacity to repair them promptly. The railway modernisation programme has spent billions of dollars building standard-gauge lines that decay for want of maintenance budgets, trained personnel, and procurement systems that can deliver replacement parts before the existing ones fail. A sleeper replaced after it cracks costs ₦50,000. A derailment caused by that cracked sleeper costs ₦500 million in emergency repairs, compensation, and service suspension.

The NRC's institutional architecture was designed for a colonial-era narrow-gauge network, not for standard-gauge equipment that requires precision maintenance. The mismatch between the infrastructure that was built and the institution that was supposed to run it is the reason the lines decay before they mature. The colonial railway employed approximately 28,000 people in 1960 and moved 2.5 million metric tons of freight annually. By 2024, the NRC employed approximately 8,000 people and moved less freight in absolute tons than it did six decades earlier, despite the economy being nominally forty times larger. The infrastructure has declined in absolute terms while the economy has grown in nominal terms. This is not stagnation — it is regression.

The regression is not merely statistical. The regression is visible in the abandoned railway stations across Nigeria — the Kaduna station clock tower, the Kano marshalling yard, the Enugu workshop — all monuments to a network that once moved groundnuts, tin, and coal across the federation. Today, those stations are occupied by squatters, petty traders, and criminal gangs. The tracks have been stripped of sleepers for firewood. The signal boxes have been vandalised for copper wire. The NRC does not have the security budget to protect its own infrastructure, let alone the maintenance budget to operate it. The railway that built the colonial economy has become a linear slum.

The Abuja–Kaduna corridor offers a preview of what happens when maintenance precision is absent. Opened in July 2016 at a cost of $874 million — $500 million financed by China's EXIM Bank — the 186-kilometre line was Nigeria's first standard-gauge railway and its most politically visible. On 28 March 2022, armed terrorists bombed the track near Katari in Kaduna State, causing a train carrying approximately 970 passengers to derail. At least eight passengers were killed, and 63 were officially declared abducted. The NRC suspended services for eight months. Services resumed in December 2022 under heavy armed escort, with CCTV installations and military patrols. Security was not the only problem. On 26 August 2025, a train derailed at Asham Station on the same corridor, injuring 21 passengers.

A preliminary report by the National Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), released in September 2025, attributed the Asham derailment to poor infrastructure maintenance and operational lapses. Defective sleepers and point switches had been flagged in an earlier derailment at the same location thirteen months prior. The NSIB noted that some sleepers damaged in the previous incident had been patched rather than replaced. Personnel had received only initial training, with no refresher courses. Critical monitoring and communication equipment — CCTV systems, clocks, and signalling — was defective or non-functional at the time of the accident. On 16 March 2026, a coupling failure caused a collision on the same Asham section, with 429 passengers aboard. The NSIB had already issued recommendations for comprehensive sleeper replacement and OEM-standard point switches. Those recommendations were not implemented before the next failure.

The Abuja–Kaduna line is not a story of terrorism alone. The line tells a story of a state that can build a railway but cannot maintain it, secure it, or respond to its own safety investigators. Between 2020 and 2022, Nigeria recorded 183 derailments nationwide. The Warri–Itakpe line, commissioned in the same era of railway revival after 33 years of construction, operates at lower frequency and remains constrained by infrastructure limitations. The Port Harcourt–Maiduguri rehabilitation, begun in 2011, remains unfinished. The Kano–Maradi line, intended to connect Nigeria to Niger Republic, has progressed in fits and starts since its announcement. Each project shares a common biography: announced with presidential enthusiasm, funded by foreign loans, built by foreign contractors, and handed over to an NRC that cannot order spare parts without six months of bureaucratic delay.

Dr. Kayode Opeifa, NRC Managing Director, acknowledged in May 2025 that the corporation's history "is the history of Nigeria itself." The statement is accurate. The railway modernisation programme has produced lines that decay for want of the maintenance culture, engineering staff, and procurement speed that would keep them running. The NRC does not need more lines. It needs a procurement system that can deliver a sleeper before the next derailment. It needs a training programme that produces engineers who can maintain standard-gauge equipment. It needs a budget that spends more on spare parts than on personnel. None of these needs is technically difficult. Each is institutionally blocked by the same cash-management framework that starves FERMA, defers road contracts, and rolls over capital allocations year after year.

The Steel That Never Was

The Ajaokuta Steel Complex in Kogi State is the most expensive non-producing industrial asset in Africa. Cumulative government investment in the complex since its conception in 1979 ranges from $5 billion to $8 billion, depending on whether ancillary infrastructure, sunk costs, and repeated rehabilitation attempts are included. Not a single tonne of commercial steel has been produced from Ajaokuta. The original conception, developed with Soviet technical assistance under agreements signed in the 1970s, envisioned an integrated steel plant that would feed Nigeria's industrialisation with domestic pig iron, billets, and finished steel products. What was built instead was a monument to procurement failure: contracts awarded, revoked, re-awarded, and abandoned across eight administrations.

The Soviet-designed blast furnace was never fully integrated with the downstream rolling mills. The oxygen plant, the lime kiln, and the coke oven battery were built by different contractors to different specifications, creating a complex that could not operate as a single system even if all its parts were functional. The most recent privatisation attempt, a contract to Global Steel Holdings Limited in 2004, was revoked in 2008 after no production materialised. The plant was subsequently re-nationalised. In 2024, the Tinubu administration announced a new "technical audit" of Ajaokuta — the same move made by every administration since 1994. The audit will identify the same faults: obsolete equipment, incomplete auxiliary plants, a lack of reliable gas and power supply, and a workforce that has been paid for decades without producing steel.

The institutional significance of Ajaokuta is not that it failed. The significance lies in the fact that it has been failing for forty-six years since its 1979 conception without any administration closing it, completing it, or admitting that the original design was flawed. Ajaokuta survives as a budget line, an employment scheme, and a political symbol. Its continued existence on the federal balance sheet — consuming appropriations without generating output — is a precise analogy for the broader capital budget. Money is allocated, released in fractions, and absorbed by obligations that produce no commercial return. The Ajaokuta workforce numbers in the thousands. They arrive at the plant, clock in, and perform tasks that do not result in steel. Their salaries are paid from state budgets that could otherwise fund road maintenance, primary health care, or classroom construction.

The workforce has a vested interest in the plant's continued non-operation: closure would mean redundancy. Redundancy in a labour market with 53.4 per cent youth unemployment — the last measured rate, from Q4 2020 — is a political risk no governor or president wishes to take. Ajaokuta functions as a jobs programme disguised as a steel plant, sustained by the same fiscal mechanism that sustains the NRC's payroll-without-trains and FERMA's budget-without-maintenance. The steel that never was is the infrastructure that was never maintained, the railway that was never repaired, and the road that was never completed. They share the same ledger.

The political economy of Ajaokuta's survival is straightforward. The complex employs thousands of voters in Kogi State, a swing state in federal elections. Any administration that closes the plant risks losing those votes and the votes of their extended families. The governors of Kogi State, regardless of party, have consistently lobbied Abuja to keep Ajaokuta on the federal budget. The result is a bipartisan consensus in favour of continued non-production. Ajaokuta is not maintained because it produces steel. Ajaokuta is maintained because it produces political support. The steel that never was has been replaced by the votes that always are. The 2024 technical audit will produce another report. That report will join the others on a shelf in Abuja.

Global comparison makes the Ajaokuta failure starker. South Korea's POSCO, founded in 1968 with a comparable ambition to build domestic steel capacity, produced its first crude steel in 1972 and became one of the world's most efficient steel producers by the 1980s. Brazil's CSN, established in 1941, was producing commercial steel within six years. Ajaokuta, conceived in 1979, has had forty-six years and has not produced a single commercial tonne. The difference was not geological — Nigeria has iron ore, limestone, and natural gas in abundance. The difference was institutional: POSCO and CSN were managed as commercial enterprises with performance targets, while Ajaokuta was managed as a political project with employment targets. The failure belongs to the institutional architecture that was supposed to turn engineering into output.

The States That Cannot Pay Their Workers

Federal capital failure has a subnational mirror. Cross River State, in Nigeria's South-South geopolitical zone, had an Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of approximately ₦18–22 billion in 2023, according to state fiscal data and National Bureau of Statistics revenue compilations. Its domestic and external debt stock in the same period stood at approximately ₦180–200 billion. The debt-to-IGR ratio is approximately 9:1. Cross River's annual tax revenue cannot cover one-ninth of its outstanding debt. The state is not technically insolvent because it receives monthly FAAC allocations that service its obligations and pay its workers. But the arithmetic reveals a state that has no fiscal capacity independent of federal transfers. Every naira Cross River spends on infrastructure, salaries, or debt service originates in Abuja, not in Calabar. The state's fiscal autonomy is a fiction sustained by the federation account.

Cross River has been cited repeatedly in Debt Management Office state debt reports as a debt distress case. Debt service consumes a disproportionate share of its FAAC receipts, leaving minimal room for capital expenditure. The state's monthly IGR is insufficient to cover even basic administrative costs without federal inflows. Roads in Calabar and its environs deteriorate without state-level maintenance budgets. The Tinapa Business Resort, a multi-billion-naira leisure and commercial complex launched under Governor Donald Duke in the 2000s, operates far below capacity, its infrastructure decaying for want of state funding. Cross River is not unique. The state simply displays the ratio most visibly — the gap between what a state owes and what it can generate has become too large to obscure. Other states with comparable ratios include Osun, Ekiti, and Plateau, each carrying debt burdens that dwarf their independent revenue capacity.

Imo State presents a different face of the same collapse. Governor Hope Uzodimma assumed office in January 2020 after the Supreme Court overturned the election of Emeka Ihedioha. Uzodimma inherited a civil service payroll that had not been paid for approximately 15 to 18 months. Salary arrears accumulated across the preceding administration had reached a point where teachers, health workers, and local government staff had effectively worked without guaranteed compensation for more than a year. Court orders directing the state government to clear the arrears were ignored or stalled. The Imo State chapter of the Nigerian Labour Congress repeatedly issued ultimatums that produced partial payments rather than full settlement. By 2023, some categories of workers had received fractions of their due, while others remained in arrears. The state's dependence on FAAC — approximately 85 per cent or more of total revenue — meant that any disruption in federal allocations immediately translated into unpaid salaries and stalled local projects.

The pattern extends beyond Cross River and Imo. In 2023, at least eighteen states were unable to pay the national minimum wage of ₦70,000 per month without federal assistance. The National Economic Council, chaired by the Vice-President, meets monthly to discuss FAAC distribution but rarely discusses what states do with the money after it arrives. The council has no enforcement mechanism to compel states to invest in capital projects or to maintain roads. A state governor who spends 90 per cent of FAAC receipts on salaries and debt service faces no sanction from the federal government, because the federal government operates under the same constraints. Such a crisis reproduces the federal pattern at state level.

The constitutional framework reinforces this dependency. The 1999 Constitution assigns most revenue-raising powers to the federal government, while assigning most service-delivery responsibilities to the states. States are expected to build roads, run schools, and maintain hospitals with revenues they are structurally discouraged from raising. The concurrent list allows both federal and state taxation, but in practice the Federal Inland Revenue Service collects the taxes that matter — VAT, company income tax, petroleum profit tax — and shares them through FAAC. A state that wants to build its IGR must tax its already impoverished residents or compete with the FIRS for the same tax base. The architecture produces fiscal infants: 36 states that cannot feed themselves.

The Imo and Cross River cases are not outliers. They represent the logical endpoint of a fiscal architecture that allows 36 states to survive on federal transfers without building independent tax bases. When FAAC inflows are adequate, states paper over their insolvency with federal money. When FAAC contracts — as it did during the 2015–2016 oil price crash and again during the 2023–2024 naira float — states default on salaries, pensions, and contractor payments. The infrastructure that should have been built with state-level capital budgets is never built, because the capital budget is the first item deferred when FAAC receipts fall. Subnational fiscal collapse is itself an infrastructure failure: the roads that Cross River cannot maintain from its own revenue, the primary health centres that Imo cannot equip because salaries consume the budget, and the schools that neither state can adequately fund. The federation account distributes poverty as efficiently as it distributes revenue.

The One That Worked

Against this record of failure, the Second Niger Bridge stands as a genuine exception. The bridge, which connects Anambra State to Delta State across the Niger River, opened in December 2022 after financing through Sukuk bonds — Islamic bonds structured to avoid interest and tied to specific asset construction. The total cost was approximately ₦200 billion. The DMO's Sukuk Issues Register shows that Sukuk bonds totalling approximately ₦1.09 trillion were issued between 2017 and 2024. Proceeds were ring-fenced for specific projects including the Second Niger Bridge, sections of the Abuja–Kano dual carriageway, and the Apapa–Oshodi–Oworonshoki expressway rehabilitation. The Second Niger Bridge is the most visible Sukuk success. The bridge was completed, is operational, and was financed through a mechanism that prevented the appropriated funds from being diverted into general expenditure.

What made the Second Niger Bridge different was not the engineering. The difference lies in the financing architecture. Sukuk proceeds are legally tied to the asset; investors have a contractual claim on the project, not on the government's general revenue. This creates an enforcement mechanism that conventional budget appropriations lack. If the money is diverted, the Sukuk issuer defaults on a securities obligation, not merely on a budget line. The ring-fencing prevented the project from becoming a payroll supplement or a variation-order fund. Investors can enforce this claim through the Securities and Exchange Commission, not through the Budget Office.

The bridge also benefited from sustained political attention across two administrations — Buhari, who commissioned it, and Tinubu, who inherited its completion. That continuity is rare. Most infrastructure projects in Nigeria restart under every new administration with new contractors, new costs, and new delays. The Second Niger Bridge demonstrates that Nigerian infrastructure can be built when the financing mechanism removes the money from the ordinary appropriation-and-release cycle. The exception proves the rule: the rule is that the ordinary cycle destroys projects.

Why Sukuk has not been replicated is the subject of Chapter 11. The exception proves that Nigerian infrastructure can be built when the financing mechanism removes the money from the ordinary appropriation-and-release cycle. Sukuk requires transparent project accounting, independent asset verification, and compliance with Islamic finance standards that many federal ministries are not equipped to meet. The conventional budget appropriation, by contrast, allows ministries to commingle capital and recurrent expenditure, to divert project funds to salary shortfalls, and to reallocate money mid-year without legislative scrutiny. Sukuk is politically inconvenient because it removes the discretion that makes the conventional budget useful to the political class. The Second Niger Bridge succeeded not because Sukuk is a superior financing mechanism in the abstract, but because it imposed accountability that the ordinary budget avoids.

The bridge does not, however, solve the maintenance problem. FERMA's annual budget remains below a tenth of its requirement. The access roads to the Second Niger Bridge will require maintenance that FERMA cannot fund. The Lagos–Ibadan railway, the Lekki Deep Sea Port, and the Second Niger Bridge all share a common risk: they were built with innovative financing or foreign contractor precision, but they will be maintained by the same Nigerian institutional architecture that has failed every previous asset. The port that half works, the train that derails, and the bridge that stands are all subject to the same post-construction decay. What distinguishes the Second Niger Bridge is that it reached completion before the decay could begin. Whether it survives the decay is a question that only FERMA's budget and the NRC's spare parts procurement can answer — and both of those ledgers are already in deficit.

The maintenance deficit will outlast every successful construction project. The Second Niger Bridge will require deck resurfacing within fifteen years. The Lagos–Ibadan railway will require track renewal within twenty years. The Lekki Deep Sea Port will require dredging and quay maintenance indefinitely. None of these maintenance needs is reflected in the current federal budget. FERMA's ₦229.99 billion proposal for 2026, even if fully funded, would not cover the maintenance needs of the roads already built, let alone the access roads to new bridges and ports. Nigeria is building an infrastructure portfolio that it cannot afford to maintain — and then wondering why the portfolio decays.

The arithmetic of infrastructure failure is cumulative, not sudden. Every year that maintenance is deferred, the cost to repair triples. Every year that the capital budget is under-released, the construction sector contracts and skilled workers emigrate. Every year that Ajaokuta consumes appropriations without producing steel, the opportunity cost is measured in primary health centres not equipped, in classrooms not built, and in roads not surfaced. The World Bank's $100 billion annual estimate is not an aspirational target. The neglect compounds with interest, measured in lives disrupted and productivity lost.

That $100 billion figure represents the maintenance and construction backlog that has accumulated across four decades of under-release, deferred repair, and abandoned projects. The state is not short of money. The FIRS collected ₦21.6 trillion in 2024. The state is short of the institutional architecture that turns collected money into maintained roads, functioning railways, and produced steel. Without that architecture, every appropriation is an intention, every release is a fraction, and every completed project is an exception that proves the rule of institutional incapacity.

The Federal Ministry of Works received ₦2.21 trillion in the 2025 appropriation — against a maintenance need of ₦700 billion for roads alone. The FIRS collected ₦21.6 trillion in 2024. The distance between those two numbers is not a gap in ambition. That distance is a gap in institutional architecture. Chapter 7 shows what happens to the ₦21.6 trillion before it ever reaches a road.

Sources

1. World Bank. Infrastructure for Development in Nigeria: Constraints, Gaps, and Options. 2020.
2. World Bank. Nigeria Country Partnership Framework 2023–2027. 2023.
3. Budget Office of the Federation. Capital release data (January–July 2025, cited in Punch, February 2026).
4. Senator Saidu Ahmed Alkali, Minister of Transportation. Statement to National Assembly joint committee (February 2026).
5. Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power. Statement on zero capital release through Q1 2025, House of Representatives hearing (March 2025).
6. Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA). 2024 appropriation, release, and utilisation data; 2025 performance review (2025).
7. Muhammad Bello Goronyo, Minister of State for Works. Statement on FERMA budget inadequacy (2025).
8. Senate Committee on FERMA. Statement on proposed budget attention (January 2025).
9. David Umahi, Minister of Works. Statements on Lagos–Ibadan Expressway (The Nation, 4 February 2025); East–West Road deadlines (BusinessDay, 11 January 2025); Abuja–Kaduna–Zaria–Kano reconstruction costs (Punch, April 2025).
10. National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Rail passenger traffic and revenue data (2025); State-level Internally Generated Revenue data (2023).
11. Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC). 2025 and 2026 budget proposals (cited in Railway Supply, January 2025; The PUNCH, January 2026).
12. Dr. Kayode Opeifa, NRC Managing Director. Statement on washout repairs and procurement delays (May 2025).
13. National Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB). Preliminary report on Asham Station derailment (September 2025); preliminary notice on Rigachikun coupling collision (March 2026).
14. Debt Management Office (DMO). Sukuk Issues Register (2017–2024); state debt data (2023).
15. Federal Ministry of Steel Development / Bureau of Public Enterprises. Ajaokuta Steel Complex procurement and privatisation records (2004–2024).
16. Nigerian Labour Congress, Imo State Chapter. Press statements on salary arrears (2020–2023).